On Monday 31 October 1977, an RTÉ News crew went out to Bray, Co. Wicklow. Children in homemade costumes and masks were going from house to house asking for fruit and nuts. Others were dragging firewood together for bonfires that were, strictly speaking, illegal. RTÉ Archives notes that 1977 was the first year Ireland had a public holiday at or around Halloween.
The neat part is the calendar. That June, the government had made the last Monday in October a public holiday. In 1977, the last Monday in October happened to be the 31st. The country’s first October bank holiday fell on Halloween itself.
Halloween in Ireland is older than anyone can prove. The Halloween most of us remember, though, is a twentieth-century one. It was written down, filmed and argued over in the papers, and that is the one we can tell with confidence.
What we actually know about Samhain
Samain (modern Samhain) marked the start of winter in early Irish tradition. The National Museum of Ireland calls it “the first day of winter”. It was one of four seasonal turning points, alongside Imbolc, Bealtaine and Lughnasa, and 31 October is still Oíche Shamhna in Irish.
The medieval tales use it in two ways. It is a time for gatherings: Serglige Con Culainn opens with the Ulstermen’s yearly assembly, held for three days either side of Samain and on the day itself, and given over to games and feasting. It is also the night the Otherworld stands open. In Echtra Nerai, the hero walks into the fairy mound of Crúachan on Samain night. These tales were written down by Christian monks; Echtra Nerai survives in a manuscript of around the early sixteenth century, copied from a text usually dated to about the tenth. They are wonderful literature, not instructions for a ritual.
What the early sources don’t describe is just as important. Three popular claims, briefly:
- “The Celtic New Year.” This was suggested by the Victorian scholar Sir John Rhys, largely from much later Manx folklore. The only surviving pre-Christian Celtic calendar, from Coligny in Gaul, seems to begin in summer (Dimitra Fimi).
- “A festival of the dead, taken over by the Church.” All Saints on 1 November and All Souls on 2 November developed between the ninth and twelfth centuries, and in Germanic rather than Celtic lands, as the historian Ronald Hutton puts it. Halloween’s link with the dead is real, and it is a Christian one.
- “The druids’ fire at Tlachtga.” The story of a Samhain fire on the Hill of Ward, near Athboy, comes from Geoffrey Keating’s history, completed around 1634. Excavations there found signs of intense burning, but nothing that ties it to Samhain (BBC Travel).
Even RTÉ News told viewers on Halloween 1979 that in the ancient calendars 1 November was New Year’s Day (RTÉ Archives).
What we can say for certain is narrower and more interesting: what people in Ireland actually did on the last night of October, within living memory, because they wrote it down.
1937: fifty thousand children write down Halloween
Between 1937 and 1939, the Irish Folklore Commission asked national-school pupils across the 26 counties to collect lore from their parents, grandparents and neighbours. Some 50,000 children in around 5,000 schools filled roughly 740,000 pages. (Schools in the North weren’t part of that scheme; a separate Ulster scheme followed in the 1950s.) The Schools’ Collection is now online at dúchas.ie, where more than 900 entries are tagged Halloween.
A pupil at Dromore school, near Bantry, Co. Cork, set the whole evening down in one page. “This night is also called ‘Snap Apple Night,'” it begins: an apple hung from the ceiling, hands tied behind the back, and the same again with an apple floating in a tub of water. Then came the brack. It was customary, the entry says, to have “a barm-brack into which are put, a ring, a stick, a rag, and a pea” (Schools’ Collection, Drom Mór, Beantraí). The ring meant you’d be first married. The stick foretold a quarrelsome marriage, the rag poverty, and the pea a life unmarried.
There was a blindfold game too. Three saucers were set out, and where your hand landed told your future: wine meant you’d stay at home, earth meant death, and water meant you would cross the sea.
In Clonshaugh, Co. Dublin, the ring could turn up in the colcannon instead, and boys went house to house in old clothes and “false faces” with a mouth organ and melodeon, collecting apples, nuts and money. In Cork and Leitrim, the night’s mischief meant cabbages thrown at doors, doors tied shut and bags stuffed down chimneys.
Ireland’s customs around a birth have their own folklore too, which we’ve written about in Irish baptism customs.
Barn or barm? The brack in the letters pages
The papers didn’t just report Halloween; their readers argued about it, almost every year. The food historian Regina Sexton of UCC has traced the row.
In November 1924, a Co. Tipperary reader wrote to The Irish Times to object to the paper calling it “barm brack”. In the first week of November 1927, the Belfast News-Letter carried a week of letters on the same question. A correspondent signing as “Girnie-Go-Gabby” said the bakers had it wrong. John McWatters of Cromac Bakery replied that, in his thirty years in the trade, it had always been barm, from the brewer’s yeast. Florence Irwin of Stranmillis Training College took the other side: barn, she argued, from the Irish bairgen, a loaf, and breac, speckled.
In 1933, Charles E. Jacob, of the biscuit firm, wrote to The Irish Times in favour of barn. By 1938, the paper’s Irishman’s Diary was hoping to head off the annual flood of letters on the subject before it started.
Eighty-odd years on, nobody has settled it, and the ring is still in there. The stick, the rag and the pea have mostly gone; a shop brack today usually carries only the ring, which is perhaps the kindest of the four.
Turnips first: the lantern that crossed the Atlantic
Before the pumpkin, there was a turnip, a candle and a determined child with a knife. The National Museum’s Country Life collection at Turlough Park holds a “ghost turnip”, a plaster model of a lantern of the type made around Fintown, Co. Donegal, about 1900. A local schoolteacher sent the original to the museum in 1943, and the museum artist Eileen Barnes made the model, since a real turnip wouldn’t have lasted (National Museum of Ireland). A Leitrim pupil in the Schools’ Collection described the same thing: a hollowed turnip with two eyes and a big mouth, a candle inside, set on a stick under a sheet, and properly frightening on a dark road.
Ireland kept All Saints, All Souls and the old seasonal festival through the Reformation, and, in Hutton’s words, “massive Irish emigration to America in the 19th century took it over there”. The museum describes the pumpkin as an American development of the Irish tradition. In time, the costumes, the trick-or-treat and the orange pumpkin came back across the Atlantic on television and in the shops.
“Help the Halloween party”: the Halloween we remember
RTÉ’s cameras kept coming back. On Halloween 1973, pupils of St Kieran’s School in Bray rode off in wigs and costumes on a horse-drawn cart to collect apples (RTÉ Archives). In 1977 came the homemade masks and the bonfire wood. By 1979, RTÉ News was reporting that people poured petrol on bonfires, “to the dismay of the fire services”.
In 1986, the folklorist Barbara O’Flynn told Morning Ireland that bonfires and trick-or-treating belonged to the eastern half of the country but were spreading. The West, she said, had the older practical jokes: cabbages against doors and farm gates swapped in the night (RTÉ Archives). The same year, Evening Extra found rockets and bangers on sale illegally on Henry Street in Dublin.
At the door, the words were usually “help the Halloween party”. In An Irishman’s Diary for The Irish Times in October 1997, Tom Farrell remembered his own childhood version: bin-liners, cardboard witches’ hats and “never an adult in sight” (Irish Times).
The masks changed too. On 29 October 2001, RTÉ News reported from Smyths in Dublin that parents were increasingly buying costumes rather than making them (RTÉ Archives). The “false faces” of the 1930s had become something you bought. As Clodagh Doyle of the National Museum has put it, “nowadays, less is homemade”.
A week off and a city in costume
The last Monday in October has been a public holiday in the Republic since 1977 (S.I. No. 193/1977). Since 2003, when school calendars were standardised, the Halloween mid-term has been the same week for every family. This year it runs from Monday 26 to Friday 30 October.
In Derry, the modern Halloween has its own origin story. Coming up to Halloween 1985, publican Brian Doherty threw a fancy-dress night at Doherty’s Bar on Magazine Street. A security alert sent the costumed crowd out onto the streets, and, as he told BBC News NI, “the following year everyone was doing fancy dress”. Doherty himself is careful not to call it the first parade. Civic celebrations followed, and the BBC now calls the city’s festival the largest Halloween party in Europe.
A paper from the last night of October
A Halloween birthday has always come with a story attached. So has a wedding on the last Saturday of October.
If someone you love was born on 31 October, or you were married on or around Halloween, the paper from that date sets your day beside everything else happening in Ireland. Someone born on Monday 31 October 1966 turns 60 this Halloween; a couple married on Saturday 31 October 1981 reach their 45th. The Newspaper Book for Milestone Birthdays and the Anniversary Newspaper Book reproduce the complete edition from that date, hand-bound at Kennys Bindery in Galway with the name on the cover.
For a hall or a study, a framed newspaper page is a quieter choice: the masthead and the date, as they were printed. You can choose from the titles on the framed-page list, including the Irish Examiner (the Cork Examiner in older years), the Irish Press, the Belfast Telegraph, The Irish News and the Belfast News-Letter, or a local paper (for a weekly, the first issue after the date). If the date falls on a Sunday, choosing the Irish Independent brings you that day’s Sunday Independent.
Some dates carry a sporting story, like Seamus Darby’s goal in 1982 or Sonia O’Sullivan’s silver in Sydney. Halloween’s is quieter, and it belongs to every house.
The night somebody wrote down
The essays, the letters and the film clips all exist because someone thought an ordinary night was worth keeping.
No one can tell you for certain what happened at Samain. But we know what was baked into a brack near Bantry in the 1930s, and what the children of Bray asked for at the door in 1977. Somebody wrote it down.
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