About
A directory of Irish poetry, compiled because no single current, free, English-language reference to the whole tradition existed.
Maintained by Simon James Brady, a poet from County Cavan living in Dublin. It is free, carries no advertising, and is updated a few times a year.
It is a directory, not a commentary: no reviews, no rankings, no critical readings.
Scope
The whole island of Ireland. Poets writing in Irish, in English, or in both, plus the Hiberno-Latin and Ulster Scots traditions. Living and dead, early Irish period to the present. Irish-born poets abroad and poets long resident in Ireland who were born elsewhere are both included. The site is written in English; Irish-language names and titles are given in Irish.
How it is made
This directory was compiled with substantial machine assistance. Names, dates and links were gathered from published sources — reference works, publishers' catalogues, encyclopaedia entries, obituaries — and verified against them. A link is kept only where the page it points to describes the same poet and agrees on the dates; where it does not, the entry carries no link rather than a wrong one.
Most entries carry what could be established from the sources alone: a name, dates, a county, a language, and a link onward. Fewer have a written description of their own.
Nothing here was invented to fill a gap. Where a fact could not be established it is absent, not guessed at, and where no source could be found the entry says so.
For a good deal of the older Irish-language and bardic material nothing reliable exists online at all. Those entries point at the printed record instead.
The date at the foot of a page is when it was last looked at.
It is a selection, not a complete record.
The compiler is listed in the directory. Simon James Brady is an Irish poet. His entry follows the same rules as every other and says on the page itself who compiled the site.
Editorial rules
Where a poet has asked that their work be treated in a particular way, that wish is respected — Biddy Jenkinson's refusal to be translated into English within Ireland is the standard example. Sexuality and gender identity are recorded only for poets who are dead and whose lives are a matter of public record.
Corrections
Corrections are wanted, particularly on dates and on entries that have gone stale — and so are removal requests. Use the contact form.
If you are a poet listed here
You did not supply this entry and you were not asked, so here is the position under the General Data Protection Regulation.
What is held: your name, dates, county, the language you write in, the period your work belongs to, links to published sources, and in some cases a short descriptive line. No sensitive personal data is recorded about living people — nothing about sexuality, religion, politics, health or private life. Where a source contained such material it was removed rather than published.
Where it came from: published sources. Nothing was obtained privately and nothing was inferred from your work. Why: a free, non-commercial reference work published in the public interest — legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f), and the exemption for literary and academic expression in section 43 of the Data Protection Act 2018.
Your rights: to see what is held (it is the page itself), to have it corrected, to have it removed, to object, and to complain to the Data Protection Commission. Removal requests are acted on before they are discussed — ask and the entry comes down, no reason required and none sought. Use the contact form.
If you are just reading
No cookies, so there is no banner to click. No analytics and no tracking — you are not counted, profiled or followed. No third-party requests: no fonts, scripts, embeds or images load from anywhere else, so nothing about your visit reaches another company. No accounts, forms or newsletter. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which keeps server logs including IP addresses as part of delivering the page; that is GitHub's processing, under its own privacy statement.
Accessibility
Plain HTML and text, so it should work anywhere. No JavaScript, so nothing breaks without it. A skip link is the first thing on every page, headings and landmarks are semantic, text resizes with your browser, and light and dark follow your system setting. Most pages are under 20KB.
Known gaps: colour contrast has not been formally audited
against WCAG AA, and Irish-language text is not yet marked with a
lang attribute, so screen readers will pronounce it as English.
On a bilingual site that matters, and it is the next thing to fix.
Last checked