Irish Kilt?

[cessna152towser]

One question: Who are the fanatics? Fanatics of what?

I hope by fanatics the previous poster was referring to those of us who are fanatics of kilts.
I am 25% Irish, having one grandparent whose family came from County Armagh and I have a kilt in County Armagh tartan which I have worn out and about in Northern Ireland and in Eire. I have to say that the kilt turns more heads in Ireland where it is not seen as an every day garment. Nobody in County Armagh has ever recognised the modern, non-traditional County Armagh tartan as their own district tartan.

[Cecil]

Hollywood may have helped with the idea that the Irish wear kilts. Check out the John Wayne movie The Quiet Man. The Duke has his two sons wearing kilts in that movie during the horse race scene.

[castledangerous]

Hollywood may have helped with the idea that the Irish wear kilts. Check out the John Wayne movie The Quiet Man. The Duke has his two sons wearing kilts in that movie during the horse race scene.

The pipers?

[Cecil]

Just past the piper scene there at two boys setting by a wagon. One is Patrick Wayne and the other I believe is his brother Micheal Wayne, both are wearing kilts.

[kiltbook]

The tartan kilt is a Scottish garment. It always has been and will always be seen as such. Having said that, the kilt has been worn by a minority of individuals in Ireland since the reign of Queen Victoria.

In the 19th Century Irish nationalists adopted the kilt as the national costume of Ireland. Men like Patrick Pearse, Sir Shane Leslie, and William Gibson, 2nd Baron Ashborne.

Performers used to wear the kilt for Irish dance competitions. In the 1990s the uniform was changed to black trousers.

The Irish have never had tartans and clans. There are Irish families and Irish kilts, but there have never been Irish clans or tartans. If you spend time on the internet you will see information about Irish clans and tartans but this is baloney.

Currently, in the Irish diaspora, the kilt is worn for St. Patrick's Day dinners and celebrations, ceilis (Celtic dances), and feis (Irish festivals, i.e., Irish Fest). Bagpipers and pipebands wear Irish and Scottish tartan kilts.

In the past, an Irish kilt was always plain or a single solid color. It can be ANY color, but saffron is seen as the most authentic. Black is the most popular. Some wear green or blue on St. Patrick's Day.

Here are three photos of Irish kilts:

Two photos from the 2008 World Irish Dance Competition in Dublin, Ireland:






Here is a publicity photo of Celtic Thunder. You can watch them perform on your local PBS station.

[kiltbook]

Here is the still from The Quiet Man with John Wayne's sons wearing kilts:

[MacSpadger]

Here is the still from The Quiet Man with John Wayne's sons wearing kilts:

Wow, that scene looks so un-Irish it boggles the mind.

[bikercelt1]

We all know that the Kilt is not Irish, but culturally unaware people don't. There are more people that ask if I'm Irish than ask if I'm Scottish ( I always respond that I'm American but my ancestors were Irish and Scottish). I sometimes point out that if I was dressed in "Irish clothes" people probably wouldn't even recognise that I was dressed in ethnic clothing.

Jamie

[Zardoz]

Here is the still from The Quiet Man with John Wayne's sons wearing kilts:

Those boys blue kilts are representative of what many Irish school uniforms were like in the time the film takes place.

[O'Callaghan]

Well, here we go again.

Firstly, let me point out that this is X Marks the SCOT.

Next, Gaelic culture in the Scottish Highlands came from Ireland, not vicea versa. Yes, the people there are also of Pictish and Viking origin, but the language is not (to the extent it is still used), nor much of the culture. Yes, the kilt originates in Scotland, but it is derived from the Irish brat (rhymes with cart, not with cat), which was a cloak.

To confuse matters, the English sent Scots as settlers over to Ireland to deliberately change the demographics of the population, but that was hundreds of years later, and few of them were highlanders, although due to internal migration, many were of highland descent. If that weren't confusing enough, there was even later population movement from Ireland to Scotland, mainly to cities (Sean Connery and Billy Connolly are famous Scots of recent Irish descent).

There were indeed Irish clans. Clan based ownership of land comes from the Brehon law, another thing which the Gaels brought to the Highlands from Ireland. Sorry, the Scots DID NOT invent clans. Some may split hairs by insisting on calling Irish clans septs instead of clans, but AFAIK this is only based on one reference in one book, and arguing about what to call them is sophistry anyway. Cromwell forced many Irish clan chiefs off their land, and forcibly relocated some to Connaught, the Western province of Ireland, moving the chief of the Callaghans in particular from County Cork to County Clare.

As for tartan and clan tartans, that's two questions. Celts wore tartan before they ever set foot in the British Isles, and the brats (cloaks) worn by the Irish who founded the Gaelic culture in the Highlands were said to be 'striped', so probably tartan.

Most Scottish clan tartans, OTOH, were only designed hundreds of years after the clan system died out. As for Irish tartans with actual names, let alone representing Irish clans, these are even more recent. However, several registers of tartans now exist, and anyone can essentiallly register anything they like to represent any group, as long as they have some woven, so under such a system Callaghan Modern is as valid as McDoofus of Mullthwacket Muted, or WHY, and sometimes the Scottish ones are not much older than the Irish ones. I actually have cousins in Scotland whose clan tartan goes back to all of 1986 (to be fair, they are lowland or border Scots).

Irish kilts were conceived in the latter part of the 19th century, at the tail end of the celtic revival period, and were originally solid saffron or solid green, to deliberately be different from tartan kilts worn in Scotland. There is some irony in this, given that firstly the Scots got tartan from the Irish, and secondly solid colour kilts were once relatively common in Scotland. I consider the events of over 100 years ago to be history, but evidently some here choose not to.

IME it is not popular on a site with SCOT in the name to point out that tartan and clans (but not clan tartans nor kilts) and Gaelic came to Scotland from Ireland, and yet they did. Nor is it popular to say that the first kilts originated by wearing a belt over the top of an Irish cloak, and yet they did.

As for whether anyone in Ireland wears a kilt in the present day, probably only for weddings and to play the pipes. So, about as much as in Scotland, really.