Eight of them, and for each one two dates: how old the thing is, and how old its story is. They are rarely the same. The spiral at Newgrange is five thousand years old and its meaning is a modern guess; the Claddagh ring is a seventeenth-century design with a medieval European family; the shamrock has always grown here and its famous story was first written down in 1726.
A gold harp with silver strings on a blue field (Azure a harp Or, stringed argent) is the arms of Ireland, and the harp is the only musical instrument that is a national emblem anywhere. The model is the Trinity College Harp, a late-medieval Gaelic cláirseach, wire-strung and the instrument of the Gaelic nobility's professional harpers.
How old: The harp is recorded as the arms of the king of Ireland as early as the thirteenth century; Henry VIII took it for his new Kingdom of Ireland in 1541; the Free State took it back in 1922; and it was registered with the Chief Herald on 9 November 1945.
Sources: Wikipedia — Coat of arms of Ireland ↗ · Wikipedia — Celtic harp ↗
Seamróg is the diminutive of seamair, clover: simply 'young clover', and it usually means one of two small clovers, yellow or white. Worn on St Patrick's Day, presented in a bowl to the President of the United States every March, carried by Aer Lingus on its tail.
How old: The plant has always grown here. The story that Patrick used it to explain the Trinity is first written down in 1726, thirteen centuries after him, and the wearing of shamrock on his day is recorded from the 1680s.
Sources: Wikipedia — Shamrock ↗
Two hands holding a crowned heart: friendship, love and loyalty. Named for the Claddagh, the old fishing village outside the walls of Galway, where its modern form was first made in the seventeenth century. How it is worn (which hand, which way the heart points) is read as a sign of whether the wearer's heart is taken.
How old: Rings with clasped hands, fede rings, were engagement and wedding rings across medieval and Renaissance Europe; the Claddagh is Galway's version of a much older idea. The oldest surviving examples were made by the goldsmith Bartholomew Fallon.
Sources: Wikipedia — Claddagh ring ↗
A small cross woven from rushes, its arms bound off-centre around a woven square, made on 1 February, Brigid's feast and the old festival of Imbolc, and hung from the rafters to keep the house under the saint's protection for the year.
How old: The custom is first attested in the seventeenth century and was in decline by the twentieth. It was the RTÉ logo from 1962 to 1995, which is how a whole generation knows it.
Sources: Wikipedia — Brigid's cross ↗
A Latin cross with a ring around the crossing, decorated with interlace. It came out of the high crosses of early medieval Ireland and Britain, and it is on half the gravestones in the country.
How old: The ringed cross emerged in Ireland and Britain in the early Middle Ages and spread through the high crosses raised from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. The name 'Celtic cross', and its enormous popularity, date from the Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century.
Sources: Wikipedia — Celtic cross ↗ · Wikipedia — High cross ↗
Three spirals turning from one centre. It is carved on the entrance stone at Newgrange, which is the image most people mean when they say 'Celtic spiral'.
How old: Neolithic. The Newgrange stones were carved around 3200 BC, some two and a half thousand years before anyone who could be called a Celt reached Ireland. The motif turns up again in the Iron Age La Tène style, which is where the 'Celtic' label attaches.
Sources: Wikipedia — Triskelion ↗ · Wikipedia — Newgrange ↗
Endless interlaced bands, most of them varieties of a basket weave, used to decorate the great manuscripts (the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels) and the metalwork and stone crosses of the same centuries.
How old: Insular art, from about the seventh century: Irish, Northumbrian and Pictish craftsmen working in a shared style. The knots themselves have older cousins in Roman mosaics and Coptic manuscripts.
Sources: Wikipedia — Celtic knot ↗
Green, white and orange, in vertical bands, hoist to fly, in the proportions one to two. Green for the Gaelic and Catholic tradition, orange for the followers of William of Orange, white for the peace between them — the flag is an argument for reconciliation in three colours.
How old: A green-and-orange cockade was worn at a meeting in Cork in March 1830; the white was added that September by Emelia Eleanor Hamilton of Dublin, with the line 'Let orange and green, no longer be seen, b'stained by the blood of our island'. Thomas Francis Meagher presented it as a flag in 1848, 'the white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between Orange and Green', it flew over the GPO in 1916, the Free State adopted it in 1922, and Article 7 of the 1937 Constitution made it the national flag.
Sources: Wikipedia — Flag of Ireland ↗
The harp. It is the arms of the State, a gold harp with silver strings on blue, registered with the Chief Herald in 1945 and recorded as the arms of the king of Ireland since the thirteenth century. The shamrock is the popular emblem; the harp is the official one.
No. The shamrock is young clover with three leaves, which is the point of the Trinity story; the four-leaf clover is a lucky mutation of any clover anywhere.
Two hands (friendship) holding a heart (love) under a crown (loyalty). Made in Galway from the seventeenth century, from an older European tradition of clasped-hands rings. How it is worn signals whether the wearer's heart is taken.
The ringed cross is Christian, from the early medieval high crosses of Ireland and Britain. The story that the ring is a pagan sun symbol is a Victorian guess, not a record; the name 'Celtic cross' itself dates from the nineteenth-century Celtic Revival.
It is older. The spirals at Newgrange were carved around 3200 BC, thousands of years before the Celts; the motif reappears in Iron Age La Tène art, which is where the label comes from. What the Newgrange spirals meant is unknown.
Green for the Gaelic and Catholic tradition, orange for the Protestant followers of William of Orange, and white for the peace between them. It was first made as a cockade in 1830 and presented as a flag in 1848.
The harp as an instrument, and the rest of the tradition · Why there is no such thing as a family crest · The high crosses themselves · St Patrick's Day, honestly · Imbolc and the Irish year