Irish Home Essentials

What makes an Irish home? Is it the neatly folded wrapping paper saved for another Christmas? Or the pressure cooker that you can’t throw out but you haven’t used since 1987?

Séamus Ó Conaill, author of You Know You’re Irish When ..., examines the artifacts of an Irish home, from ash trays on back windowsill to the potpourri gathering dust in the ‘good room’. The list includes many newer objects that make our 21st century homes more Irish as ever!  

So, is your home as truly Irish as you think?

Dublin-based writer, Séamus Ó Conaill teaches in University College Dublin and works for publishers Gill Books. His short fiction has been published in a number of journals, featured on RTÉ Radio, and he has read at many festivals and universities in Ireland, China, Spain and the USA. His work has been short-listed for the Maeve Binchy Award and the Sky Arts Future’s Fund, and long-listed for BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines Short Story Competition. He is the editor of The Dublin Illustrated Edition of Ulysses (The O’Brien Press, 2014).

Emma Byrne is a graphic designer and artist. She is a graduate of Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. She has won numerous awards for her design including The IDI (Irish Design Institute) Graduate Designer of the Year, the IDI Promotional Literature Award for her work on Brown Morning, and a Children’s Books Ireland Bisto Merit Award for her work on Something Beginning With P: New Poems from Irish Poets. She has illustrated many books, including Best-Loved Oscar Wilde, Best Loved Yeats, The Most Beautiful Letter in the World by Karl O’Neill, a special edition of Ulysses by James Joyce, and A Terrible Beauty by Mairéad Ashe Fitzgerald. She lives in a thatched house in Co. Wexford.