Frequently Answered Questions on soc.culture.irish. Send corrections, suggestions, additions, and other feedback to The FAQ maintainer.
The best places to look are the Irish Independent on Thursday's (business "pink pages"), Friday's Irish Times (in the Business Supplement) or the Sunday Independent. If you're interested in Dublin the Evening Herald is also worth a look.
There are a number of websites of interest:
http://www.exp.ie/ http://www.monster.ie http://www.sbpost.ie/recruitment/ http://www.skillsgroup.ie/ http://www.stepstone.ieThere's also a jobs fair every Christmas called the `High Skills Pool', which has taken place in Dublin for the past couple of years. They are partly funded by the IDA and will give you information on companies in Ireland for free if you have any queries. You can also get an information pack on moving back to Ireland, e.g. what the tax rate is, etc.
You need to have the following :-
i) For the Irish grandparent, birth certificate and marriage license to whoever was the other grandparent of the applicant.
ii) For the parent (child of the Irish grandparent) birth certificate and marriage license to your other parent.
iii) For you: birth certificate
ALL of the above documents must have complete details that prove the connection. In other words, the birth certificate must show the names, dates of birth and places of birth of both your parents, so that they can be conclusively identified to be the same person mentioned on the marriage license and their own birth certificate. Irish documents seem to include these details automatically, but in the U.S., you may have to contact the Vital Statistics Bureau in the state of birth to get an official copy containing more details.
ALL of the documents must be official, i.e., must bear the raised stamp of the issuing agency.
You have to fill out forms, attach photographs and have it all witnessed, not by a notary public, but by a "clergyman, high school principal, lawyer or bank manager".
It costs about $160 if you are claiming through your parent(s), in addition to the cost of getting copies of the documents. If you are claiming citizenship based on your grandparent(s) then you need to pay $270 for Registration of Foreign Birth.
There's about a one-year backlog in processing applications.
If you live elsewhere or you want more detailed information, you could try looking at http://www.irlgov.ie/iveagh/embassies/default.asp
Not surprisingly, service industries are probably your best bet. There is a fair demand for waiters/waitresses during the summer tourist season. Note that pubs usually require previous experience before they'll hire you to tend the bar. There are other jobs to be had but they are in niche areas. Whatever you look for, the best hunting strategy is often to just tramp from door to door.
Good preparation and timing are essential. In particular, if you need accommodation, it's often best to look for it after Irish students end their exams (which may be several weeks after you do). Contact an Irish consulate or BUNAC for more information.
You are not likely to be able to find someone using the Net if they don't use the Net themselves. The chances that someone reading soc.culture.irish knows them is vanishingly small. You're more likely to find them the "old-fashioned" way, by asking family, friends or relatives.
"Shanty Irish" was used to describe the poorest of the poor Irish immigrants, the kind who ended up in shanty town (the word "shanty" may derive from the Irish "sean tí", meaning "old house"). Today "shanty" in the States is a derogatory term for people who in Ireland might be known as culchies but the people so described need not necessarily be of Irish descent.
"Lace curtain Irish" could be as poor as the Shanty Irish but they had notions of being more respectable. They were called that because they would put up lace curtains for appearances sake, even in a shanty town. Thus the term is far from being a complement.
{ Thanks for clarification to Neil Cosgrove. }
"Black Irish" is often taken to mean Irish people with dark hair and eyes. One romantic story is that they are the descendants of shipwrecked sailors of the Spanish Armada. Unfortunately for the story, it is very unlikely that enough of the sailors survived for their genes to be in the population visible today. A variation on this theme says they are descended from Spanish Moors who traded with people on the west coast of Ireland. Another explanation is that it's common in Irish to give people nicknames based on their hair, such as Seamus Dubh and "black Irish" is just a carryover of this into English. Some people say that the "black Irish" were the original inhabitants of the island and all the rest were just blow-ins.
One other interpretation is that "black Irish" refers to the descendants of Irish slaves taken to the Caribbean island of Montserrat during Cromwell's time. The descendants of these slaves and black slaves from Africa live there to this day. The surprising thing is that they still speak with an Irish accent.
There is some speculation as to where this expression comes from. One plausible source is the Irish word dubh (pronunced dove, meaning black) which is commonly used as an intensifier. It might also have something to do with the Royal Black Institution, a body for Ulster Protestants similar to the Orange order.
There's a FAQ on travellers at http://ireland.iol.ie/~pavee/faq.htm
In Irish, "c" is always pronounced hard; the letter "k" which is not used in spelling Irish words. The Greeks were the first to write about the Celts, using the word "Keltoi", which suggests that the hard sound is also historically accurate.
{ Thanks for clarification to Michael Ruddy. }
Long answer: shamrock and clover are both used to refer to species of trefoil (genus Trifolium, from the Latin meaning "having three leaves"). Clover is used for large species and shamrock for small species. Shamrock, like clover, is common in Europe, not just in Ireland. [Answer blatantly cogged from Des Higgins, resident newsgroup expert on the subject.]
If it's not on the above site, try asking on rec.music.celtic.
There are many stories about the Claddagh ring. Claddagh itself refers to a small fishing village just near Galway city. The Claddagh ring supposedly originated in this area. The ring has a design of a heart being encircled by a pair of hands with a crown above the heart.
Some more information can be found at http://www.oocities.org/welisc/ifaq/claddagh/claddagh.html
There is an extensive archive of Hiberno-English available at: http://www.hiberno-english.com