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172 free Irish trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
14 free Irish trivia questions with answers. Irish trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Ireland and Irish Culture trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01What is the longest river in Ireland?
River Shannon
The River Shannon, about 360 km long, all but cuts the west off from the rest of Ireland, so Cromwell's 1650s land settlement used it as the line and moved Catholic landowners beyond it.
Q 02Which country joined the European Economic Community in 1973 alongside Ireland and the United Kingdom?
Denmark
Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom all joined on 1 January 1973; Norway had been due to join with them, but its voters rejected membership in a referendum a few months earlier.
Q 03What is the traditional Irish potato pancake, associated with the northern midlands and Ulster, called?
Boxty
Boxty mixes grated raw potato with mashed potato, and one old rhyme warns that anyone who can't make boxty will never get a man.
Q 04Which Dublin-born theatre manager wrote the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula?
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker ran London's Lyceum Theatre for the actor Henry Irving; he took the name Dracula from an 1820 history of Wallachia and Moldavia written by a British consul.
Q 05What is the Irish language called in Irish?
Gaeilge
Gaeilge is the Republic's first official language, yet at the 2022 census only about 72,000 people spoke it every day outside the education system.
Q 06Which armed insurrection against British rule seized central Dublin for a week in April 1916?
The Easter Rising
The Easter Rising opened with Patrick Pearse reading a proclamation of an Irish republic from the steps of Dublin's General Post Office, which the rebels made their headquarters.
Q 07Ireland's national anthem, 'Amhrán na bhFiann', is commonly known by what English title?
"The Soldier's Song"
"The Soldier's Song" was written in English by Peadar Kearney, a writer of rebel songs; the Irish words usually sung today are a later translation by Liam Ó Rinn.
Q 08Which of Ireland's 32 traditional counties, lying just south of Dublin, is nicknamed the Garden of Ireland?
Wicklow
Wicklow's mountains sheltered rebels so well after the 1798 rising that the government drove a Military Road through them; 26 of the 32 counties now form the Republic.
Q 09Which ancient Irish game is often described as the fastest field sport in the world?
Hurling
Hurling runs through Irish myth: the boy Sétanta was playing it when he was invited to the feast where he killed the smith Culann's guard dog, earning the name Cú Chulainn, 'Culann's hound'.
Q 10Which Treasury official, named in 'The Fields of Athenry', ran Great Famine relief?
Charles Trevelyan
Charles Trevelyan held relief to a minimum in the belief that it would teach self-reliance; in the ballad, the hero is transported for stealing 'Trevelyan's corn' to feed his family.
Q 11From which country was the 16-year-old Saint Patrick carried off by pirates as a slave?
Britain
Patrick was seized from Roman Britain at sixteen by Irish raiders and spent six years herding sheep before escaping, as he recounts in his Confessio.
Q 12Bloomsday, celebrated in Dublin every 16 June, honours the hero of a novel by which Irish writer?
James Joyce
James Joyce set Ulysses on 16 June 1904, the day of his first outing with his future wife Nora Barnacle; fans now retrace Leopold Bloom's route through Dublin in Edwardian dress.
Q 13County Antrim's Giant's Causeway is 40,000 interlocking columns of which rock?
Basalt
The Giant's Causeway columns are basalt, formed when a Paleogene lava flow cooled and contracted into mostly hexagonal pillars around 50 to 60 million years ago.
Q 21Which animal is Ireland's only native land reptile?
Common lizard
The common lizard ranges further north than any other land reptile and usually bears live young; the slow worms seen around the Burren look like a second native reptile but are thought to be introduced.
Q 22Which North American conifer is by far the most widely planted tree in Ireland's forests?
Sitka spruce
Sitka spruce, named after a town in Alaska, makes up about half of Ireland's forest, which had shrunk to under 2% of the land by 1900 and has been replanted mostly with conifers.
Q 23Which body did Ireland leave by becoming a republic in 1949?
The Commonwealth
Q 14How long was the lease Arthur Guinness signed in 1759 on the St James's Gate brewery?
9,000 years
The lease ran for 9,000 years at 45 pounds a year, but it no longer applies: the brewery outgrew its four acres and the company bought the site outright.
Q 15Carrauntoohil, the highest peak on the island of Ireland, stands in which county?
Kerry
Carrauntoohil in County Kerry is not part of any national park: like the rest of its range, the mountain is privately owned, and walkers climb it by the landowners' leave.
Q 16How many Irish writers won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 20th century?
Four
Four: Shaw, Yeats, Beckett and Heaney. James Joyce, arguably the most influential of all, never won.
Q 17The Republic of Ireland's rapid economic boom from 1995 onwards was nicknamed what?
The Celtic Tiger
The Celtic Tiger reversed Ireland's long history of emigration: labour shortages brought workers in, and the country became a destination for immigrants.
Q 18What is the title of the Republic of Ireland's head of government?
Taoiseach
Taoiseach, Irish for 'leader', replaced the plainer title President of the Executive Council when Éamon de Valera's constitution came into force in 1937.
Q 19Which Irish monk founded a monastery on the Scottish island of Iona around 563?
Saint Columba
Saint Columba sailed to Iona with twelve companions; tradition says he left Ireland after a quarrel over a psalter he had secretly copied helped to bring on a bloody battle.
Q 20Which people founded the settlements that grew into Dublin and Limerick?
Vikings
Vikings first came to Ireland for plunder, then in 841 set up a fortified naval camp, a longphort, at Dublin; it grew into a town with a large slave market.
The Commonwealth lost Ireland on 18 April 1949; within days the London Declaration changed the rules so that India could stay in as a republic, but Ireland never rejoined.
Q 24John F. Kennedy visited his great-grandfather's homestead at Dunganstown in 1963, in which Irish county?
Wexford
Wexford was home to Patrick Kennedy, who left the farm at Dunganstown for Boston in 1848 to escape the Famine; his great-grandson came back as US president five months before his death.
Q 25Which colour, rather than green, did the Anglo-Irish Order of St Patrick adopt when it was founded in 1783?
Blue
Blue was chosen because the Order of the Thistle had already taken green and orange seemed too sectarian; a blue field still backs the Irish president's standard.
Q 26The first Saint Patrick's Day parade held in Ireland took place in 1903 in which south-eastern city?
Waterford
Waterford's 1903 parade came long after emigrants had made the custom their own: North American cities had been parading for well over a century, and Dublin had no official parade until 1931.
Q 27Which nickname for Ireland is first recorded in William Drennan's 1795 poem?
The Emerald Isle
The Emerald Isle is credited to Drennan, a Belfast doctor who helped to found the United Irishmen and had stood trial for sedition, and been acquitted, the year before.
Q 28Which volcanic Caribbean island keeps Saint Patrick's Day as a public holiday?
Montserrat
Montserrat's holiday commemorates the enslaved Africans who planned an uprising for 17 March 1768, counting on the Irish slave owners being drunk on the saint's day; the plot failed and cost nine of them their lives.
Q 29Which Saint Patrick's Day custom drops the sprig worn all day into the last drink of the night?
Drowning the shamrock
'Drowning the shamrock' ends the day: the sprig goes into a final glass of whiskey, beer or cider, a toast is drunk, and it is then swallowed or tossed over the shoulder for luck.
Q 30Which instrument appears on the Guinness logo?
Harp
The harp, modelled on the medieval 'Brian Boru' harp kept at Trinity College, was trademarked by Guinness in 1876, and it faces the opposite way from the harp on Ireland's coat of arms.