Lora O'Brien – Irish Author & Guide
Your Authentic Connection to Ireland
“On Union, the latest album of collaborations he sings a song called Gaelic Ireland which sounds like it was written 100 years ago. I have the feeling it will be sung in 100 years from now.” – John Reynolds: Producer to Irish Artist Damien Dempsey. I was sitting in a coffee shop with my sister-in-law,…
‘Worties’ was the common name in Ireland, from the English ‘wortes’, which were vegetable greens and members of the onion family, such as cabbage leaves, spinach, beet greens, leeks, wild garlic leaves and so on, as well as some of the leafy herbs used for seasonings, like borage, parsley, and sage. When cooked together with…
Sometimes a Goddess fancies a change. Immortality can get awful boring after a time. So it was with the Goddess Macha. She decided she wanted a home, friends of her own, a family… and that’s how she ended up on the doorstep of a wealthy merchant in the mountains of Mourne. She knocked, asked to…
Here we’ll look at the basics on Maedbh, the ‘Celtic’ warrior queen of Connacht (yes, that’s the correct spelling – ‘Connaught’ is the later anglicised version) – her home, family life, relationships, ruling from Rathcroghan, burial, and the cultural inspiration she has become. “How do you spell that?!” It depends on which version of Gaeilge, the…
In Gaelic Ireland, your husband being too fat to have sex was grounds for divorce. A woman could easily divorce her husband for obvious reasons, like hitting her hard enough to cause a blemish, but she also had the legal protection which ensured he couldn’t go down to the village pub and blab about their…
Ah, the Celtic tribes – they painted themselves blue with woad and ran naked into battle. Right? Got high as a kite to scare the bejaysus out of their enemy and improve their ferocity because, as we all know, woad is a powerful hallucinogen. Right? We’ve all seen Braveheart, and that King Arthur film on…