Starting the Irish month is Seachtain na Gaelige, spreading over almost 2 weeks, it will be on between 5th and 17th March, rolling straight into St. Patrick’s Day festivities.

Seachtain na Gaelige is a festival or a collection of events and activities all around the country, organized by local councils, schools, libraries and other cultural bodies with the intention of celebrating everything Irish through the medium of Irish language. You can choose from music events, literature reading, walking, table quizes, film viewing and more and more. Just check their website for activities in your area.

St. Patrick’s Festivals are starting all around the country well before the actual day. Dublin is the first to set off with culture and entertainment on Friday 12th. There will be treasure hunts and funfairs for children and comedy and music gigs, walking tours and film screenings for others. The Parade starts at 12 noon on 17th March at Parnell Square.

If Dublin is too big for you, you might enjoy Limerick better, where they’re promising to organize the second biggest parade in the country. As for many years so far, Limerick has a special band parade happeinng on the Sunday 14th, which is well worth seeing! The band parade or the Limerick International Band Competition will start on Sunday at 12 noon. St Patrick’s Day parade is starting at 12 noon on Wednesday. Both parades will go down the O’Connell Street.

Cork and Galway are extending St. Patrick’s Day celebrations well beyond the day itself. Starting the weekend before the big event, both cities are offering a great variety of culture and entertainment. The parade in Galway starts at 12:30 on Dominic Street and Cork will start walking at 1 pm at South mall.

Since Sunday 7th February 2010 I’ve had reports that the Irish dictionary at http://www.irishdictionary.ie (same as English Irish dictionary http://www.englishirishdictionary.com) is having trouble. The site is running, except that if you search for an Irish word it displays a database error. All other searches work fine.

One person emailed info@irishdictionary.ie but that email address bounced.

Let me know any updates if it’s back working again.

Thanks to Jonathon, David and Michael for the tips.

They have just announced that you can download the full validated Irish-English dictionary as a free PDF document.

The PDF is generated daily, so any newly validated entries will always appear in the next days’ PDF.

Give the PDF a download today.

We’re happy to report that IrishGaelicTranslator.com have recently began to offer to powerful tools for your Irish writing activities.

The Irish grammar check tool is a simple yet powerful tool to check your Irish grammar.

The Irish spell check tool can be integrated right in to Microsoft word.

Click here to listen to the St Patrick’s Day sayings.

Also on that page, you can download a completely free Pub Cheat Sheet for the day. Check it out!

If you’re interested in visiting the Gaeltacht, check out GaeltachtTravel.com. It’s an in-depth guide (with nice photos) on the Gaeltacht regions of Ireland.

Irish Dictionary.org is now online! It is a new collaborative Irish dictionary. It’s starting empty, but will gradually build up as it learns what words are most sought after.

Visit the new dictionary.

There are not that many Irish dictionaries available online. There’s Focal.ie, An Foclóir Beag, and EnglishIrishDictionary.com, for example. But that’s about it.

All of these dictionaries are closed. They do not harness the power of the Internet masses, of the large Irish-speaking community online. They don’t make their databases freely available to the Irish language community, either.

Here’s where a collaborative dictionary could help. Such a dictionary would be empowered by its users. It could keep up-to-date with current word usage. Wiktionary is such an effort, but it’s not very easy to quickly search through.

Here’s where Foclóir Gaeilge.ie comes in. It will be an Irish collaborative dictionary. With a simplicity for searching, and a simplicity for adding to it. Simple as that.

The dictionary will be accessible through both Irish and English language interfaces.

Here’s a sneak preview: http://www.focloirgaeilge.ie

Believe it or not, the last official English-Irish dictionary to be published was 50 years ago, but Tomás de Bhalraithe (see English-Irish Dictionary reviews).

The dictionary project (see foclóir.ie) has been undertaken by Foras na Gaeilge, the body responsible for the promotion of the Irish language throughout the whole island of Ireland. Part of their responsibility is to develop Irish dictionaries.

The project will eventually comprise of 50,000 English headwords. This is currently being compiled as of early 2008. After that, it will be translated to Irish. Interestingly, equal emphasis will be given to the three dialects of Connacht, Ulster Munster. Whenever the project finished in the coming years, it will be available both in print an in electronic format.