Tampa Bay Irish

06/17/2026

Care for a stout?

☘️ There is a reason the Irish pub survived every attempt to replace it. It was never really about the drink.

The Irish pub is one of the oldest continuously functioning social institutions in the world, with some establishments in continuous operation for over three hundred years. But its longevity has nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with function. In a country with centuries of colonial poverty, land dispossession, and cramped domestic living, the pub was the one room available to ordinary people that belonged to nobody in particular and everybody at once. You did not need money to stay. You did not need status to speak. The conversation was the currency, and everyone had some. The seanchai, the traditional Irish storyteller, did not perform in halls or theaters. He performed in pubs, because that was where the community actually gathered, and the stories he told were the living memory of the townland, passed from generation to generation across the same worn timber bars.

What the Irish brought to America, to Australia, to Britain, was not just a taste for stout. It was this specific understanding of what a room full of people talking to each other actually does for a community. The Irish-American saloon, the working-class bar in Liverpool, the corner pub in Melbourne, all of them carried the same architecture of belonging. A place with no agenda except conversation and presence. If you grew up around Irish pub culture, in Ireland or in the diaspora, you already know that some of the most important things you ever heard were said across a bar. Drop the name of your local in the comments. And follow The Irish Remembered. ☘️

06/17/2026

Forty shades indeed!

I miss the river Shannon
And the folks at Skibbereen,
The moorlands and the mid lands
With their forty shades of green.
Again I want to see and do
The things we've done and seen,
Where the breeze is sweet as Shalimar
And there's forty shades of green!

Those are lyrics from a song written by Johnny Cash while on a trip to Ireland in 1959, and these are the mid lands he talks about, captured by me as my plane came in to land at Shannon Airport. 🥰

(M) ☘️

06/17/2026

Where the Liffey flows….

River Liffey flowing through the center of Dublin, Ireland 🇮🇪

06/17/2026

May the boreen rise to meet you!

🌿 The old bóithrín rarely led straight anywhere.

These narrow country lanes wound their way through fields, farms, and townlands, linking people long before modern roads crossed the landscape. Bordered by stone walls, hedges, and overhanging trees, they followed the shape of the land rather than cutting through it.

The Irish word bóithrín means “little road,” giving us the English word boreen. Many still survive today, carrying the character of an older rural Ireland.

For those who grew up near one, a boreen often recalls a quieter pace of life, where the journey mattered as much as the destination.



📸 Irish Roots

06/17/2026

Gaelige!

☘️ Go n-éirí an bóthar leat.
May the road rise to meet you.

Few Irish blessings are as widely known, or as enduring, as these simple words.

Rather than wishing for wealth or success, the blessing hopes that life's journey will unfold with a measure of kindness. That obstacles will be fewer, burdens lighter, and the next step easier to take.

For generations it has been spoken at farewells, written in letters, and shared at important moments in life. Though carried around the world by the Irish diaspora, its message remains unchanged.

A quiet blessing for the road ahead, wherever that road may lead.



📸 Irish Roots

06/17/2026

Go south from Dublin to the Wicklow Valley and find the magic of Glendalough!

It was built in the 6th century by a man who wanted to be alone with God. Within a generation it had become one of the most important centers of learning in the Western world.

Glendalough, which translates from the Irish as the valley of the two lakes, was founded by St. Kevin around 570 AD in a remote glacial valley in the Wicklow Mountains. Kevin chose it specifically for its isolation. What grew there over the following centuries was anything but isolated. The monastic city of Glendalough at its peak housed thousands of monks, scholars, and students drawn from across Ireland and from Britain and mainland Europe. It produced manuscripts, trained missionaries, and sent learned men back into a continent still recovering from the collapse of Roman infrastructure. The Round Tower that still stands there today, over 30 meters tall and over a thousand years old, served as a bell tower, a landmark for approaching pilgrims, and in times of Viking raid, a place of refuge, its doorway set four meters above the ground so the ladder could be pulled up behind the monks sheltering inside.

What moves me about Glendalough is how much of it is still physically present. You can stand inside St. Kevin's Kitchen, a stone oratory so old it predates the Norman arrival in Ireland by centuries, and the walls around you are the original walls. The stones have not been replaced. The place has not been reconstructed. It has simply endured, the way the Irish have always endured, quietly, without asking for permission, outlasting everything that tried to erase it. If Glendalough is on your Ireland itinerary or your bucket list, drop it in the comments. And follow The Irish Remembered. ☘️

06/17/2026

Off the beaten path in Beara!

The Beara Peninsula sits between Cork and Kerry and belongs entirely to neither. It has its own character, its own wildness, and its own way of making you feel that you have finally found the Ireland you were looking for. 🌊☘️The Beara Peninsula — Leathantas Bhéara in Irish — stretches for nearly fifty kilometers into the Atlantic between Bantry Bay to the north and the Kenmare River to the south, a spine of ancient Old Red Sandstone mountains flanked by some of the most dramatically beautiful coastal scenery in Ireland, its villages small and its roads narrow and its visitors proportionally fewer than those of the more celebrated Kerry peninsulas to the north. This relative quietness is Beara's greatest gift — a landscape of comparable drama to the Ring of Kerry, with a fraction of the tourist traffic, and consequently a quality of genuine solitude and unhurried discovery that the most visited corners of Ireland have largely lost. The Beara Way — the 196-kilometer walking route that circles the peninsula — takes walkers through mountain passes, along cliff-top paths above the Atlantic, through fishing villages, and past the extraordinary concentration of Bronze Age stone circles and standing stones that makes Beara one of the most archaeologically rich landscapes in Munster.The Beara Peninsula is also the landscape of one of the great Irish family sagas — the O'Sullivan Beara clan, who held this peninsula as their territory for centuries before the catastrophe of 1601, when the defeat of the Irish and Spanish forces at the Battle of Kinsale ended the Gaelic order in Munster. Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beara, the last chief, led his surviving people — over a thousand men, women, and children — on a desperate fourteen-day midwinter march from Glengarriff to Leitrim in January 1603, one of the most harrowing episodes in Irish history, a march through winter mountain and contested country in which over nine hundred of the thousand who began it perished. The peninsula they left behind has never entirely recovered its pre-Elizabethan population levels. The mountains are still there. The silence in them is partly historical. 🌿⚔️Have you traveled the Beara Peninsula or driven the Healy Pass? Does County Cork or Kerry heritage run in your family? Share your connection in the comments and follow for more stories of Ireland's most remote and most rewarding landscapes.

06/17/2026

Irish whiskey 🥃 on the rise!

IRISH WHISKEY is whiskey made on the island of Ireland. The word 'whiskey' (or whisky) comes from the Irish uisce beatha, meaning water of life. Irish whiskey was once the most popular spirit in the world, though a long period of decline from the late 19th century onwards greatly damaged the industry, so much so that although Ireland boasted at least 28 distilleries in the 1890s, by 1966 this number had fallen to just two, and by 1972 the remaining distilleries, Bushmills Distillery and Old Midleton Distillery (replaced by New Midleton Distillery), were owned by just one company, Irish Distillers.

🥃 Origins-

It’s said, that whiskey in its original form, was first brought to Ireland by monks returning from travels in Europe and Asia. This original incarnation wasn’t aged in any way and was usually clear and flavoured with thyme, mint or other botanicals. You could consider this original form similar to something like gin.

It’s reported that there was Irish whiskey as far back as the 12th century, but the first written record comes in 1405, and it wasn’t until 1608, under the helm of King James I, that the first official license for the distilling of Irish whiskey was granted, but more on that later.

🥃 Different Types of Whiskey-

True whiskey connoisseurs could talk for hours about the intricacies and differences, despite our love for a good nip, we'll just give you the basics to set you right.

The first point to consider is that Irish whiskey is kiln dried rather than dried over smoked peats like in Scotland. This leads to the whiskey tasting more of the grain, rather than the smoky overtones you’d get in Scotch.

After that, Irish whiskey can roughly be separated into four distinct versions as follows:

🥃 Single Malt Whiskey: Uses malted barley, a single pot still, a single distillery and can be distilled up to three times.

🥃 Single Pot Still Whiskey: Uses malted and unmalted barley and is often refered to as “pure pot still”.

🥃 Grain Whiskey: Whiskey distilled using a continuous column or Coffey still and often lighter in colour and more neutral in taste.

🥃 Blended Whiskey: A mixture of all styles and very common in both Ireland and Scotland today.

🥃 Famous Irish Whiskeys-

Without a doubt, the most famous Irish whiskeys are Old Bushmills and Jamesons. Both are the longest running whiskey brands, to withstand the early 20th century downturn, and this legacy has played an important role in the fame of each.

🥃 Bushmills Whiskey, of the famous Old Bushmills Distillery, is a famous triple distilled malt whiskey coming from Ireland’s oldest distillery and one of the oldest in the world! The land on which the distillery still stands to this day was first granted a permit for distilling way back in 1608 by King James I!

Incredibly, the distillery is still open and operating today. You can visit and tour the grounds to get the proper sights, sounds and smells of a real-life working distillery.

You can also be sure that every bottle of Bushmills, no matter where you see it in the world, has come from this one famous spot in Ireland. Crazy!

🥃 Jamesons, or if you’re using its official name, John Jameson and Son Irish Whiskey, was first founded in 1780 by John Jameson, a Scotsman, in Dublin.

Some prefer Bushmills whilst others prefer Jameson but it’s fair to say that both are equal in terms of holding the most famous Irish whiskey crown.

🥃 The Future of Irish Whiskey-

From humble beginnings Irish whiskey became one of the country’s greatest exports in the fledgling modern world. During a 19th century peak, when Dublin was the centre of all things Irish whiskey, the country produced 10 million gallons of whiskey per year and had over 30 working distilleries up and down the country!

Sadly, that incredible growth couldn’t be maintained. Throughout much of the 20th century, popularity and demand for the drink diminished and at one point the country produced less than 500,000 gallons a year. A far cry from the glory days!

This nadir lead to countless closures and by the 1980s Ireland had just 3 working distilleries left.

Thankfully a resurgence, from 1990 onwards, driven by worldwide interest has resulted in another boom and constant year on year growth of 15-20%! Nowadays the Emerald Isle has 18 licensed distilleries and 16 more due to open in the near future!

The future of Irish whiskey is bright and we certainly think that’s a good excuse for a drink! 🥃☘🇮🇪

06/17/2026

Write On!

06/16/2026

Today is Bloomsday!