Ireland Emoji

🇮🇪 the Irish flag emoji is not a picture stored in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇮 and 🇪, Ireland's country code IE, which phones and Macs draw together as the green, white and orange tricolour. Windows' own emoji font has no country flags, so on most Windows PCs the same emoji shows as the letters IE; it still copies and pastes correctly, and anyone on a phone sees the flag. The tricolour was first flown in public by Thomas Francis Meagher in Waterford in 1848, and the 1937 Constitution names it the national flag. Green stands for the Gaelic and Catholic tradition, orange for the Protestant followers of William of Orange, and the white between them for peace. Two lookalikes catch people out: 🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire has the same colours in the opposite order, orange first, and 🇮🇹 Italy is green, white and red. Where the flag will not show, people write it as 💚🤍🧡 or 🟩⬜🟧.

☘️ shamrock, the three-leaf clover, is the emoji people mean by "Ireland emoji clover". Legend says St Patrick used it to explain the Holy Trinity, and it is worn on St Patrick's Day; every March the Taoiseach presents a bowl of shamrock to the President of the United States at the White House. 🍀 four leaf clover has a different look and meaning: a rare lucky find. It is often sent on St Patrick's Day too, and few people in Ireland mind, but ☘️ is the Irish one.

The state emblem is not the shamrock but the harp. It is on every Irish euro coin, on the passport and on the seal of the President, modelled on the medieval Trinity College harp, often called the Brian Boru harp. A 🪉 harp emoji only arrived in 2024, with Emoji 16.0, so older phones show it as an empty box. The harp on a pint of Guinness faces the other way from the state's harp, a quirk of the brewery having registered its harp first.

St Patrick's Day emojis and other Irish holidays

St Patrick's Day, 17 March, Lá Fhéile Pádraig in Irish, is the national holiday: parades in every town, 🇮🇪☘️🎉 in the group chat, and a green that spreads far beyond Ireland, from the river in Chicago to landmarks lit up around the world. 🐍 is for the legend that Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland; in fact Ireland has never had native snakes. Abroad the day comes with leprechauns, rainbows and pots of gold 🍀🌈🪙; there is no leprechaun emoji, and in Ireland itself the day is more parade and family day than costume. If you shorten the name, it is St Paddy's Day, from Pádraig, never St Patty's.

Halloween began in Ireland as Samhain, the Celtic feast at the turn of winter, and Oíche Shamhna is still a night of bonfires 🔥, costumes 👻 and barmbrack, a fruit loaf with a ring baked inside. The first jack-o'-lanterns were carved from turnips; emigrants switched to pumpkins in America, and 🎃 came back home with them. St Brigid's Day (1 February) has been marked by a public holiday since 2023; the holiday is held on the first Monday in February, unless 1 February is a Friday. It was Ireland's first public holiday named after a woman. Bloomsday, 16 June, follows the day of James Joyce's Ulysses around Dublin 📖.

Christmas is 🎄 and a candle 🕯️ in the window on Christmas Eve, an old sign of welcome. On 26 December, St Stephen's Day, Wren Boys in straw and costume go door to door with music, the old hunt of the wren 🐦, and before all of it comes the Late Late Toy Show on RTÉ, when much of the country watches children review the year's toys 🧸.

GAA, rugby and Irish sport emoji 🏑🏉

The Gaelic Athletic Association, founded in Thurles in 1884, governs hurling, Gaelic football and handball; the separate Camogie Association governs camogie. All are amateur sports played for parish and county. There is no hurling emoji and no GAA ball emoji, so fans improvise: 🏑 field hockey stands in for the hurley and sliotar, ⚽ for Gaelic football, and 🏐 is another common stand-in for the GAA ball. The All-Ireland finals at Croke Park 🏟️ are played for the Liam MacCarthy Cup in hurling and the Sam Maguire Cup in football 🏆.

On match day the real emoji are county colours in hearts: 💙 for Dublin's sky blue and navy, 💚💛 for Kerry, 🖤💛 for Kilkenny's black and amber, ❤️🤍 for Cork, 💚❤️ for Mayo, 💙💛 for Tipperary. In rugby 🏉 one team plays for the whole island, north and south, and Six Nations weekends fill timelines with 🇮🇪🏉💚. Ireland is also big on horse racing 🏇🐎, from the Galway Races to Punchestown, on links golf ⛳, on boxing 🥊, with Olympic champions Katie Taylor and Kellie Harrington, on rowing 🚣, and on surfing 🏄 along the Atlantic coast.

Irish symbols: Celtic knots, the Claddagh, music and myth

Many of the best-known Irish symbols have no emoji, so people build them. The interlaced Celtic knot of the Book of Kells and the high crosses is written 🪢 knot, and the Unicode symbol 🕈 Celtic cross (a text character, not an emoji, so it looks different on every device) stands for the ringed stone crosses. The Claddagh ring from Galway shows two hands holding a crowned heart, for friendship, love and loyalty: 🤲❤️👑 or simply 💍. 🧶 is the wool of the Aran jumper, ⛪✝️📿 the Catholic heritage of holy wells and rosaries, 🏰 the tower houses and castles that stand in almost every parish, and 🧚 the fairy forts that farmers still plough around. Irish writers are 📚, with four Nobel laureates in literature: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney.

Traditional music is played in sessions in pubs and kitchens: 🎻 fiddle, 🪈 tin whistle and flute, 🪕 tenor banjo, 🪗 button accordion, 🥁 the bodhrán frame drum, and 🪉 the harp of the old harpers. Irish dancing is 💃🕺, and the world met it through Riverdance, first performed as the interval act of the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin 🎤, one of the seven Eurovisions Ireland has won.

Food, drink, weather and the west: everyday Irish emoji

A full Irish breakfast is 🍳🥓🌭: eggs, rashers, sausages, black and white pudding and toast, with a pot of tea 🫖, because Ireland is among the biggest tea drinkers in the world per head ☕. 🥔 is the staple of colcannon, boxty and the Sunday roast, 🍲 is Irish stew, 🍞 is soda bread and brown bread with Irish butter 🧈 from grass-fed cows 🐄, and 🍟 is a bag of chips from the chipper. Galway Bay oysters 🦪 have a festival of their own every September. In the pub, 🍺 stands for a pint of stout, brewed at St James's Gate in Dublin since 1759, 🥃 for Irish whiskey, spelt with an e, and 🍻 goes with the toast Sláinte!, "health". Irish coffee was invented in the 1940s at Foynes, County Limerick, for passengers off the transatlantic flying boats.

The weather is 🌧️🌦️☔ and then a 🌈, sometimes four seasons in a day, which is why the country is so green. The west is 🌊⛰️🪨: the Cliffs of Moher, the limestone of the Burren, Skellig Michael off Kerry, and the Wild Atlantic Way along the west coast. 🌅 is Newgrange, a passage tomb older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza, whose chamber is lit by the sunrise only around the winter solstice. In the countryside 🐑 block the road, 🚜 fills the National Ploughing Championships every September, and 🐕 might be an Irish wolfhound, the tallest dog breed. 🦌 is the fallow deer of Phoenix Park in Dublin, 🐬 and 🦭 live along the coast, and 🐟 is both a salmon dinner and the Salmon of Knowledge of Fionn mac Cumhaill.

Irish letters with a fada, the old Gaelic dots and the euro sign €

Irish is the first official language of Ireland and English the second; by CLDR estimates around 5.1 million people in Ireland speak English and about 1.2 million speak Irish. Irish uses one accent, the síneadh fada, an acute that lengthens the vowel: Á á É é Í í Ó ó Ú ú. It changes words: sean is old, Seán a name; fear is a man, féar grass. You meet it everywhere, from Éire and Dáil Éireann to bilingual road signs like Baile Átha Cliath, Dublin. On Windows with the Irish or UK keyboard, press AltGr + the vowel; with Alt codes, Alt+0225 gives á, 0233 é, 0237 í, 0243 ó, 0250 ú, and 0193, 0201, 0205, 0211, 0218 the capitals. On a Mac press Option+E, then the vowel; on a phone, hold the vowel down. In HTML write á, É and so on. For the whole Irish alphabet see our Irish collection; English and French have collections of their own too.

Until the middle of the 20th century Irish was printed in the Gaelic type, the cló Gaelach, where lenition was a dot over the consonant, the ponc séimhithe: ḃ ċ ḋ ḟ ġ ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ. Modern spelling writes an h after it instead, so an ḃean is now an bhean, the woman. The dotted letters still turn up on shopfronts, gravestones, pub signs and tattoos, and so does ⁊, the Tironian et, the Gaelic shorthand for agus, "and", seen in P⁊T on old green post boxes.

Ireland adopted the euro in 1999; euro banknotes and coins replaced the Irish pound, the punt, in 2002. Prices are written with the sign first: €10, €4.50. Type € with AltGr+4 on Windows, Alt+0128 with Alt codes, Option+Shift+2 on a US Mac or Option+2 on a British one. Across the border Northern Ireland uses sterling, £, so £ and € sit side by side in border towns.