From The Children's Newspaper, 1920.

From The Century, 1889.

A lurikeen.  From St. Nicholas, 1915.

From The Century, 1889.

From The Irish Fairy Book by Alfred Perceval Graves and illustrated by George Denham, 1909.

From St. Nicholas, 1915.

Temporal anomaly investigator William Murphy notes that he 1867 Tait clock tower in Limerick does not keep time ... but we might prefer to say that the clock is "stuck" on an eternal four thirty and that it is indeed correct twice a day.

From The Century, 1889.

"A keeper of the legends of Ireland."  From The Century, 1889.

Apparently, nothing written about Ireland can be called fiction, since "Ireland is an unreal place anyway, where the unlikely seems to happen more often than anything else."  From Mrs. O' by Claude Marie Forde, 1958. 

From The Century, 1889.

From The Century, 1889.

From Legends and Stories of Ireland by Samuel Lover, 1834.

Ireland as the threshold of the Otherworld, by Cornelius Weygandt, in The Sewanee Review, 1904.

I found a pressed 6-leaf clover hiding in an expensive rare book.  A few years ago, I purchased, for an exorbitant $128, what was promised (original typo: primrosed) to be the most unusual travel account ever published -- the surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun's exploration of the eerie magic of the Irish countryside, The Crying of the Wind.  (It hadn't yet been republished in softcover; I was a year too early!)  I'd been sufficiently impressed by Colquhoun's dreamy occult novel Goose of Hermogenes to trust that the travel book would beguile me.  It did!  And though I can't help but wonder why the Universe tricked me into spending $128 just before the softcover came out, I do know that a new softcover wouldn't have had a pressed 6-leaf clover, so perhaps it all somehow works out in the end.

Here's how we know that the language spoken in heaven is Gaelic, and that the entrance to heaven, hell, and purgatory is in Ireland.  From the sublime novel The Demi-gods by James Stephens, 1921.

From Tales of Ireland by William Carleton, 1834.