The Irish consume in average 131.1 liters of beer per year - the 2nd highest per-capita consumption after the Czech Republic.
Halloween traces back its origins to the Gaelic festival of Samhain, a harvest festival held on 31 October to mark the end of summer. Samhain became associated with All Saints (1 November) from the early Middle Ages and the two progressively merged over the centuries, creating Halloween.
88% of Irish citizens are nominally Roman Catholic. The Republic of Ireland has one of the highest rates of church attendance in the Western World (around 45% of regular Mass attendance).
The ancestral language of Irish people is Irish Gaelic. Nowadays 1.6 million people claim a self-reported competence in Irish, but only 380,000 fluent speakers remain.
Many Irish family names start with "Mac" or "O'...", which means respectively "son of ..." and "grandson of ..." in Gaelic.
Ireland has won seven times the Eurovision Song Contest (in 1970, 1980, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1996), more than any other country.
The story of the world-famous vampire Count Dracula was written in 1897 by Bram Stoker, from Dublin. His real-life inspiration for his character was a friend of his, the actor Sir Henry Irving. Count Dracula was the culmination of 20 years of vampire stories in Victorian literature. Dracula is said to have been inspired by the early Irish legend of Abhartach, an evil chieftain who, after being betrayed by his subjects and slain by the hero Cathrain, rose from his grave every night to drink the blood of his subjects.
Ireland is a snake-free island. Due to its isolation from the European mainland, Ireland lacks several species common elsewhere in Europe, such as moles, weasels, polecats or roe deer.
At a height of 688 metres above the Atlantic Ocean, Croaghaun (on Achill Island) are the second highest cliffs in Europe - after Cape Enniberg in the Faroe Islands.
Phoenix Park in Dublin is the third largest walled city parks in Europe after La Mandria in Venaria Reale
(Turin) and Richmond Park in London. It covers 707 hectares (1,750 acres)
.
The Tara Mine near Navan, County Meath, is the largest zinc mine in Europe, and the fifth largest in the world.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) was founded in 1824 by Richard Martin, an Irish politician and one of the first animal rights activists.
The Anglo-Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) was the first to prove the Greenhouse Effect, the first to discover why the sky is blue (Tyndall effect), as well as a number of other discoveries about processes in the atmosphere. He was also the first scientist to be referred specifically as a physicist.
Sir Charles Algernon Parsons (1854-1931) invented the steam turbine and built the world's first turbine powered battleship and passenger ship. In 1879, Charles's elder brother, the 4th Earl of Ross, installed a water wheel equipped with a turbine on the River Camcor to provide electricity to Birr Castle and the town, making Birr (Parsonstown) the first town in the world to be lit by electricity.
The Céide Fields in County Mayo are the most extensive Stone Age site in the world. It contains the oldest known field systems in the world (6,000 years old), as well as Europe's largest stone enclosure (77 km).
Erected from 1729, the Irish Houses of Parliament was the world's first purpose-built two-chamber parliament house. It now houses the headquarters of the Bank of Ireland.
Founded in 1745, the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin is the world's oldest continuously operating maternity hospital.
The term 'boycott' comes from Captain Charles Boycott (1832-1897), the land agent of an absentee landlord from Ulster. In 1880, after refusing to reduce the rents of his employer's tenants, the Irish Land League decided to stop dealing with him. The whole community began to ostracise him to the point where even shops refused to serve him. The Times of London quickly came to use his name as a term for organized isolation, and the word entered the English language.
The world's first suburban commuter railway opened between Dublin and Dun Laoghaire in 1834 (two years before the London and Greenwich Railway).
On 9th July 1939, the Pan Am Clipper III left Botwood, Newfoundland, and landed the next day at Foynes, County Limerick. It was the first direct commercial passenger flight from America to Europe. For the next three years, the village of Foynes became the busiest civilian airport in the world, serving most flights from North America to Europe. Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway, John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosvelt all passed through Foynes Airport during WWII. Irish coffee is said to have been invented at Foynes in 1942 to cheer up passengers after a Pan Am flying boat was forced to turn back due to bad weather conditions. This golden age is commemorated in the Foynes Flying Boat Museum, on the site of the old airport. In 1942, Shannon Airport replaced Foynes as the gateway to America. It is also in Shannon that the world's first duty free opened on 21th April 1947. It served as a model for other duty free facilities worldwide.
One of the most successful beer brands worldwide, Guinness was once the largest brewery in the world (from 1914), and remains the largest brewer of stout in the world.
Ireland is the only EU country where abortion is still illegal (except to protect the mother's life).
American hi-tech companies have been investing massively in Ireland. 25% of Europe's computers are now made in Ireland. Ireland is the world's largest exporter of software. The European (or regional) headquarters and/or customer service operations of Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Oracle, Lotus, and Boeing Computer Services are all located in Ireland.
It is estimated that over 80 million people of Irish descent live outside Ireland, in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa and states of the Caribbean and continental Europe. This is 14 times more than the population of Ireland (including Northern Ireland) itself! 3 million of these emigrants still hold Irish nationality.
Roughly 34 million Americans reported Irish ancestry in the 2000 US Census, which makes it the second largest ethnic group after the German Americans. The highest concentration of Irish Americans is in the North-East (New York and New England).
About half of the population of Australia can claim Irish ancestry.
The average height of Irish men is 5' 8".
The average height of Irish women is 5'5"
Only 9% of the Irish population are natural redheads.
RTÉ's "The Late Late Show" is the world's second longest running talk show/longest in Europe.
A song only needs to sell 5,000 copies to top the Irish music charts.
An Irishman designed the White House.
