Irish History Trivia
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49 free Irish History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Irish history is unusually good at producing stories that sound invented: a pope from England handing the island to an English king, a land agent whose surname became a verb, police recruits nicknamed after a pack of hounds, and a parliament that accepted a peace treaty by a handful of votes and then went to war over it. These 49 questions run in rough order through the whole span: early monasteries and the Norman landing, the Tudor conquest and the plantations, Cromwell and the Williamite war, 1798 and its aftermath, O'Connell, the Famine and the land war, Home Rule and the revolution of 1916 to 1923, the new state, and the Troubles told through dated events and the agreements that ended them. Each answer carries a one-line explanation with the detail the textbook skipped. Play it to find out how much survived from school, use it as a classroom revision round, or print it for a pub quiz table that thinks it knows its Irish history.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which nickname for the RIC's 1920 recruits came from a Limerick hunt's hounds and their mixed uniforms?
The Black and Tans
The Black and Tans took their name from the Scarteen Hunt, whose Kerry Beagles wore those colours; a recruit's khaki-and-green outfit reminded a Limerick Echo writer of the pack. The joke stuck even after full RIC uniforms arrived.
Q 02Which land agent for Lord Erne in County Mayo, shunned by his neighbours in 1880, gave English a new word?
Charles Boycott
Charles Boycott's ostracism ended with fifty Orangemen harvesting Lord Erne's crops under a thousand police and a regiment of Hussars, at least £10,000 spent to save about £500 of produce. His surname was an English verb within a year.
Q 03Which pope, the only Englishman to hold the office, issued the 1155 bull Laudabiliter on Ireland?
Adrian IV
Adrian IV, born Nicholas Breakspear, issued Laudabiliter in 1155, and English kings cited it for centuries as papal licence to rule Ireland. Whether the bull ever existed in the form later quoted is still argued over by historians.
Q 04Who, while held in Holloway Prison, became the first woman elected to the House of Commons in December 1918?
Constance Markievicz
Constance Markievicz never took her seat, in line with her party's abstention from Westminster, so Nancy Astor became the first woman to sit in the Commons in 1919; Markievicz served instead as Minister for Labour in the first Dáil.
Q 05What grim name was given to the overcrowded, fever-ridden vessels carrying Famine emigrants across the Atlantic?
Coffin ships
Coffin ships were so called because typhus and other fevers swept their packed steerage decks, yet the term was hardly used during the Famine itself. The Famine monument below Croagh Patrick shows one with skeletons for rigging.
Q 06Which monarch had the Irish parliament pass the Crown of Ireland Act, turning the lordship into a kingdom?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII became the first monarch styled King of Ireland, but the papacy recognised the kingdom only in 1555, in a bull granted to the Catholic Mary I and her husband Philip.
Q 07Which Irish Citizen Army commander, wounded in the 1916 Rising, was executed on 12 May while tied to a chair?
James Connolly
James Connolly's foot had turned gangrenous from a wound taken in the fighting, so he was carried in on a stretcher and shot sitting down. He had built the Irish Citizen Army out of the workers' militia formed during the 1913 Lockout.
Q 08In May 2015, Ireland became the first country to approve what by a national popular vote?
Same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage won 62% of the vote on 22 May 2015. Ireland put it to the people because its constitution can only be amended by referendum, and just one constituency, Roscommon–South Leitrim, voted no.
Q 09Which hunger striker won the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election on 9 April 1981, weeks before his death?
Bobby Sands
Bobby Sands took the seat by fewer than 1,500 votes over the Ulster Unionist Harry West, and died on 5 May after 66 days without food. Westminster then changed the law so that prisoners serving more than a year could not stand.
Q 10Which English king landed at Waterford on 17 October 1171 with some 500 knights and 4,000 foot soldiers?
Henry II
Henry II came in person partly to curb his own Norman barons, who had carved out lordships in Leinster, and Irish kings from Desmond to Ulster submitted to him at Waterford and Dublin.
Q 11Which 1494 statute made the Irish parliament submit its draft bills to the English king and council for approval?
Poynings' Law
Poynings' Law, named for the Lord Deputy Sir Edward Poynings, meant no Irish parliament could even meet without a royal licence, and it hobbled Dublin's legislators until 1782. Loosening it was the heart of the 'Constitution of 1782'.
Q 12Which Earl of Kildare rebelled against the Tudor crown in 1534 and was hanged at Tyburn with five uncles in 1537?
Silken Thomas
Silken Thomas got his nickname from the silk fringes on the helmets of the 140 gallowglasses who rode with him to St Mary's Abbey to defy the king. His revolt made the Tudors take Ireland seriously, a step toward the kingdom of 1542.
Q 13Which monastery, founded by Saint Ciarán in the 540s where the Esker Riada met the Shannon, is now a ruin?
Q 21What mocking name was given to the rout of General Lake's militia by Humbert's French troops in August 1798?
The Races of Castlebar
The Races of Castlebar mocked the speed of the militia's flight from French regulars who had landed near Killala days before; Humbert was cornered at Ballinamuck within a month. In Irish 1798 is Bliain na bhFrancach, the Year of the French.
Q 22Who, after his failed 1803 Dublin rising, asked from the dock that his epitaph not be written until Ireland was free?
Robert Emmet
Robert Emmet was sentenced by Lord Norbury to be hanged, drawn and quartered, and on 20 September 1803 he was hanged and then beheaded in Thomas Street. Many veterans of 1798 had hesitated to back his rising.
Q 23Daniel O'Connell's July 1828 by-election victory, which forced Catholic emancipation, was in which constituency?
Clonmacnoise
Clonmacnoise grew where the Slighe Mhór, the great east–west road along the Esker Riada, met the Shannon, which made it a crossroads of early Irish learning and trade. Its graveyard is still in use today.
Q 14At which Cork harbour town did 4,000 Spanish troops land on 2 October 1601, drawing the Ulster rebels south to defeat?
Kinsale
Kinsale's Spanish garrison under Don Juan del Águila held out through an English siege while the Gaelic army marched the length of Ireland to relieve it, only to be routed outside the town. The last Ulster forces surrendered in 1603.
Q 15Which monarch's 1609 plantation settled English and Scottish Protestants on confiscated Gaelic estates across Ulster?
James I
James I was sold the scheme as a joint 'British' venture to pacify Ulster after its earls had fled; settlers poured in through Derry and Carrickfergus while 1,300 former Gaelic soldiers were shipped off to the Swedish army.
Q 16Which walled town north of Dublin did Oliver Cromwell storm on 11 September 1649, at the start of his Irish campaign?
Drogheda
Drogheda's governor Sir Arthur Aston refused a summons to surrender, and once the walls were breached much of the garrison was killed along with an unknown number of civilians. Cromwell's siege guns had come up the coast by sea.
Q 17What name covers the post-1695 statutes that barred Irish Catholics from public office, firearms and foreign schooling?
The Penal Laws
The Penal Laws also banned marriage to Protestants and shut Presbyterians out of public office through a sacramental test, so Dissenters too had cause to resent them. Catholics could not legally bear arms again until 1793.
Q 18What is the Dublin legislature of 1782 to 1800, which won legislative independence from Westminster, usually called?
Grattan's Parliament
Grattan's Parliament won its freedom in April 1782 with Volunteer cavalry and artillery posted on every approach as Henry Grattan carried his Declaration of Irish Rights by acclaim. The Act of Union ended it in 1800.
Q 19Storms scattered a French fleet carrying General Hoche's army and Wolfe Tone in December 1796 off which Irish inlet?
Bantry Bay
Bantry Bay came so close to a landing that Tone, aboard the Indomptable, said he could have touched either shore with his hands; the fleet had lost its commanders in the fog, in some of the worst weather on record.
Q 20Which rebel camp above Enniscorthy was overrun by General Lake's troops on 21 June 1798, ending the Wexford rising?
Vinegar Hill
Vinegar Hill was the last serious attempt by the Wexford rebels to hold territory; Lake attacked in four columns, one of them sent to seize Enniscorthy and its bridge. The fighting spilled into the town's streets.
County Clare
County Clare's voters chose O'Connell over a sitting British cabinet minister, and since a Catholic could not take his seat, Wellington's government had to choose between emancipation and unrest. Emancipation followed the next year.
Q 24Which tariffs did Robert Peel repeal in 1846, splitting his own party, as the Irish Famine forced the issue?
The Corn Laws
The Corn Laws had kept imported grain dear, and Peel needed Whig votes to repeal them because most of his own Conservatives opposed him. Late 1845 brought poor harvests everywhere, but scarcity in Britain meant starvation in Ireland.
Q 25By what name is the Great Famine's worst year, when the Gregory clause's quarter-acre rule became law, remembered?
Black '47
Black '47 brought the Gregory clause, which denied relief to any family holding more than a quarter-acre of land and was soon recognised as an estate-clearing device. Fever and mass emigration made it the grimmest year of the whole Famine.
Q 26What Irish-language name do Irish speakers give the Famine that began in 1845?
An Gorta Mór
An Gorta Mór, 'the Great Hunger', killed roughly a million people and drove over a million more to emigrate; more than three million had depended wholly on the potato when blight destroyed the crop.
Q 27The leaders of the 1848 rising at Ballingarry, including William Smith O'Brien, were transported to which penal colony?
Van Diemen's Land
Van Diemen's Land received O'Brien, Meagher, MacManus and O'Donoghue after their death sentences for the 'Widow McCormack's cabbage patch' affair were commuted in June 1849. Meagher escaped in 1852 and later led the Union's Irish Brigade.
Q 28Which tenant movement of 1879, whose first mass meeting was at Irishtown in County Mayo, demanded the 'three Fs'?
The Land League
The Land League elected Parnell as its president and Davitt as a secretary, and the Land War it led from 1879 to 1882 pursued fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale. In 1882 Parnell replaced it with the National League.
Q 29Which splinter group stabbed Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke in Phoenix Park on 6 May 1882?
The Invincibles
The Invincibles used surgical knives, and five of them were hanged in 1883 after their own leader, James Carey, turned informer. Cavendish had landed in Ireland that very day to take up his post.
Q 30Charles Stewart Parnell's career collapsed in 1890 after he was named co-respondent in whose divorce case?
William O'Shea
Captain William O'Shea filed for divorce on Christmas Eve 1889, and the November 1890 decree handed him custody of Parnell's two surviving children. Nonconformist Liberals shunned Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party split.