One person wrote this site. Everything it stands on — the framework, the
typefaces, the map of the coastline, the 412 photographs, the 880
spoken words, a dictionary from 1923 — was made by other people and given
away. A project like this only exists where both of those things are true, so
here is all of it: the person, and the whole list of what he built it out of.
Every line of this site was written, built and checked by one person. Diaz Xavier lives in Sligo — Yeats country, between Benbulben and Queen Medb's cairn on Knocknarea — and by day runs Sevenoways Innovations, a digital marketing agency. MyIreland.ie is not the agency's work and nobody commissioned it. It is a passion project: one person's attempt to put ten thousand years of Irish history somewhere anyone can reach it.
What that actually meant
Wrote the history — every era, every county, every surname, every name.
Chose and checked the sources, one claim at a time, and linked them where they are used.
Designed and built the atlas: the timeline, the map layers, the search, the quiz.
Decided the rules the site is held to, which are the hardest part and the reason it is worth reading.
The part that does not show is the editorial standard. Anyone can put ten
thousand facts about Ireland on a website; the work is in refusing the ones
that will not stand up. These are his rules, and the site is held to them
page by page.
Nothing is invented If a claim cannot be traced to a source, it does not go on the page. That is why some entries here are shorter than the ones you will find elsewhere — the rest of it was made up.
Say when the record is unclear Where scholars disagree, the page says they disagree instead of picking the tidier answer. Disputed etymologies are marked disputed; feast days that differ between calendars say so; pre-1600 boundaries are called approximations, because that is what they are.
Say when a tradition is younger than it looks The shamrock explaining the Trinity is first written down in 1726. The snakes belong to Colmcille before they belong to Patrick. Half of what is sold as ancient is Victorian, and the page says which half.
Credit everything borrowed Every photograph names its photographer, every quoted line names its source, and this page exists at all for the same reason.
MyIreland.ie is built and largely written with Claude, Anthropic's AI model, working to my direction. That should be stated here rather than left to be noticed, and it was noticed before it was stated, which is the wrong way round.
The subjects, the structure and the rules the site is held to are mine, and so is every decision about what goes in and what comes out.
The prose is largely drafted by the model and edited by me.
The sourcing is not decoration. Claims are checked against the references named on each page, and where they do not stand up they are cut rather than softened.
You should not take that last point on assertion, so here is the evidence, all of it on the site and all of it checkable:
/provinces/munster/says the meaning of Mumhain is unsettled, because the standard references do not give one. An earlier draft carried a goddess etymology that could not be sourced, and it was removed — from the county pages too, where it had been stated as fact.
/clans/coogan/says plainly that Woulfe’s 1923 dictionary has no entry for the name, instead of filling the gap with something plausible.
/clans/devine/says the family were of the same stock as the Maguires, because Woulfe says so. An earlier version had them conquered by the Maguires, which he does not say.
/counties/says Cork is larger than the six smallest counties combined. The first draft said four, which was true but understated, and it was corrected against the figures.
/famine/sets out what is documented and then says that historians divide over the word genocide, rather than picking the answer that would please more readers.
A language model will write you a confident sentence about any of those. Getting one to say “this is not known” is the actual work, and it is the only reason this site is worth more than the surname mills it competes with.
Readers who made it better
People who found something wrong, or something missing, and took the trouble
to say so. Every one of these changed the site.
u/antipositron· Reddit Pointed out that on a phone the map key, who holds the land, sat a long scroll below the map it explained, so the colours were off the screen by the time you reached them. It now sits directly under the map, on the atlas and on all 27 era pages.
u/worktemp· Reddit Had the timeline handle between the 1845 and 1922 marks and the page reading 1474, and said so with the numbers. He was right and it was a real bug: the slider is piecewise, with most of its length covering AD 400 onwards, but the labels underneath were spaced evenly, so they described a scale it does not have. 1600 was printed at 62 per cent of the track and actually sits at 80. Every mark is now placed by the same function the slider uses.
u/YoIronFistBro· Reddit Said the 1840s were not a famine but forced starvation. The page he was reading had the blight arriving and a million people dying with nothing in between, which is not neutrality — a crop failure is a natural event and what followed it was administered. The Famine page now sets out the exports, the withdrawn relief, the quarter-acre clause and what Trevelyan wrote while it was happening, and says plainly where historians divide on the word for it.
u/bill_klondike· Reddit Pointed out that the timeline plays faster than the text can be read, and suggested a tortoise and a hare. There is a speed control beside the play button now, from a quarter speed up to double, and it takes effect without stopping the playback.
u/CuAnnan· Reddit Twice. First that Brigid was missing, and that her church was every bit as historically important as Patrick's — the site had a 3,268-word hub for him and 393 words for her. Then, two hours after the new page went up, that it understated the evidence for her: it said there was little of it and stopped, when the dossier runs from two 7th-century hymns to Cogitosus of Kildare himself. He studied the cult of saints at Maynooth. The page lists the texts now, and says where it was wrong.
u/Newc04· Reddit Said it was very weird to use modern county borders to show who held land 1,500 years ago. He was right. The caveat moved from the About page into the legend and is now worded differently for each age, and the borders themselves are dashed and faint before 1169, firming up only from 1610 when the counties were actually fixed.
Patrick Mc Nelis· the corrections form Wrote in to say Mc Nelis, Mac Niallais, was missing: one of the older Donegal surnames, and common around Ardara, Killybegs, Kilcar, Carrick and Glencolumbcille. He cited MacLysaght for it. The name has a page now.
Paul Culloty· the corrections form Sent in a Kerry surname the site did not have, Ó Codlata, descendant of Codladh, sleep. Woulfe bears out every part of it, including the country either side of the Cork and Kerry border that he placed it in. He also sent a family story about the Cullotys and the MacCarthy Mór and said himself it might be one his father invented, which is why it is not on the page.
Arlía Smiley· the corrections form Submitted a name the site turned down, because the source offered was that she bears it. Told that the Clonmacnoise slab she cited could not be verified, she went and found the catalogue number: Macalister’s slab 41 of 1909, CIIC 629, and the University of Galway’s laser scan of the same stone, CLN 00074. All three check out. Arlia is on the site because she did the work, and because she drew the line herself between what the stone says and what the modern name is taken to mean.
Found something we have wrong? Tell us —
corrections are how most of this gets better, and you will be credited here
unless you would rather not be.
The software
Astro ↗ 7.2.10 · MIT The Astro maintainers and contributors The framework the whole site is built with. Every page here is plain HTML by the time it reaches you — Astro assembles it once, at build time, so there is no JavaScript framework running in your browser and nothing to wait for.
@astrojs/sitemap ↗ 3.7.4 · MIT The Astro maintainers Writes the sitemap that tells search engines every page exists, including the ones nothing links to prominently.
sharp ↗ 0.35.4 · Apache-2.0 Lovell Fuller and contributors Resizes and re-encodes every photograph on the site. It is the reason the pictures load as quickly as they do: the share cards alone went from 53 MB to 8.6 MB through it.
topojson-client ↗ 3.1.0 · ISC Mike Bostock Turns the compressed world map into drawable shapes for the diaspora map.
world-atlas ↗ 2.0.2 · ISC (data: public domain) Mike Bostock, from Natural Earth The world map behind the diaspora page — where Irish people went, and when.
Node.js ↗ 22 LTS · MIT The OpenJS Foundation and contributors Runs the build and every one of the tools that fetch, check and generate the data behind these pages.
Git ↗ · GPL-2.0 Junio C Hamano and contributors Keeps the history of the site. It is also the source of the publication dates on every page and of the changelog — those dates are read from the record of what actually changed, not typed in by hand.
nginx ↗ · BSD-2-Clause Igor Sysoev and the nginx team The web server that hands you these pages.
Let's Encrypt ↗ · Free, non-profit The Internet Security Research Group The certificate that puts the padlock in your address bar. Before Let's Encrypt, a small site like this one would have paid for that or gone without.
The typefaces
Cormorant Garamond ↗ · SIL Open Font License 1.1 Christian Thalmann, Catharsis Fonts The serif in the headings — a Garamond built for display sizes.
Inter ↗ · SIL Open Font License 1.1 Rasmus Andersson Everything else. Designed to stay legible at small sizes on a screen, which is most of this site.
Where the facts come from
The rule on this site is that a claim is either sourced or it is not made. These
are the places the sourcing comes from, and each page links the one it used.
Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons ↗ · CC BY-SA 3.0 / CC BY-SA 4.0, and public-domain material The backbone of the sourcing here. Almost every claim on this site is checked against a Wikipedia article and linked to it, the castle descriptions quote it directly with attribution, and every photograph on the site came from Commons. See the full list →
ABAIR ↗ · Used under the ABAIR API terms, with attribution The Irish speech synthesiser behind every “Say it” button. It is the work of the Phonetics and Speech Laboratory at Trinity College Dublin, and it exists because people there have spent years building speech technology for a language too small for the companies that build it for everyone else.
Logainm — the Placenames Database of Ireland ↗ · State database, consulted and linked The authority for the Irish form of any placename on this site. Where we and Logainm differ, Logainm is right.
Central Statistics Office ↗ · CC BY 4.0 The register of babies' names, 1964 to the present — the numbers behind every “in the register” panel on a name page.
Dúchas — the Schools' Folklore Collection ↗ · Consulted and linked Proverbs and customs as they were written down in the 1930s, by schoolchildren, from the people around them. A better source for a seanfhocal than any modern list.
Woulfe, Irish Names and Surnames (1923) ↗ · Public domain, digitised by Library Ireland A century old and still the reference for what an Irish name meant before it was anglicised. Library Ireland put it online for nothing.
Natural Earth ↗ · Public domain The world coastlines on the diaspora map, released into the public domain by the cartographers who made them.
The spoken Irish on this site is synthesised, not recorded: a machine reading
the word. For recordings of native speakers in all three dialects, go to
Teanglann ↗.
The map
Every county outline on this site is traced from one SVG on Wikimedia Commons. The atlas, the clan map, the famine map and every county page are all that one file, redrawn.
Astro, a static site generator: every page is assembled once when the site is built and served as plain HTML. There is no database, no content management system and no JavaScript framework running in your browser — which is why pages load quickly and keep working with scripts turned off.
Is myireland.ie open source?
The source is not public. The content, though, is sourced from things that are: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the CSO, Dúchas, Logainm and a 1923 dictionary in the public domain, all of them linked from the page that uses them.
Does this site track me?
Analytics only run if you accept them in the banner, and nothing else on the page follows you. There are no advertisements and nothing is sold. See the privacy page for what is collected when you do accept.
Why does the site credit so many things?
Because most of them are given away for free by people who did not have to. Attribution is a licence condition for some of what is used here, but for the rest it is simply the right thing to do.
If you would like to help
There is no advertising on this site, nothing is sold, nothing is behind a
paywall and nothing here is tracked beyond the analytics you can decline.
It is one person's spare time and a server bill. If it helped you find
something — a name, a townland, a great-grandparent — you can buy him a
coffee. It is not expected, and every page stays exactly as it is either way.
It shows on your statement as myireland. Buy Me a Coffee
handles the payment; this site never sees your card details.
A note on the licences
Several of the things above are used under licences that require attribution —
naming the photographer, linking the licence, saying where a line of text came
from. Those conditions are kept on every page that uses them, not gathered here
and forgotten. The rest are credited because they deserve to be.