Irish Male Name Generator

Irish men's names come in two spellings. Most have an Irish-language form and an anglicised twin: Tadhg and Tim, Séamus and James, Eoghan and Owen, Diarmuid and Dermot, Pádraig and Patrick. The fada on á, é, í, ó and ú lengthens the vowel, so Seán is "shawn" and Rónán is ROH-nawn. The daunting clusters follow rules: "bh" and "mh" sound like v or w (Caoimhín is KWEE-veen), "dh" and "gh" are soft or silent (Tadhg is like "tiger" without the r), and "Oisín" is simply uh-SHEEN.

Surnames for men use the prefixes Ó ("descendant of") and Mac ("son of"), which English records turned into O' and Mc or Mac. So Cian Ó Briain and Cian O'Brien are the same man in two registers, and Norman families who arrived in the 1100s contributed Fitzgerald, Burke, Power and Roche. Some names are tied to regions: O'Sullivan and McCarthy are thick in Cork and Kerry, Gallagher and O'Doherty in Donegal, Joyce and O'Malley in the west.

A believable name matches form and setting. A Dublin accountant reads as Conor Ryan, a character in a Gaeltacht village or Celtic fantasy as Fiachra Ó Dochartaigh, and a 1900s emigrant as Patrick Flanagan. Mixing a fada-heavy first name with a plain English surname, as in Oisín Walsh, is completely normal in modern Ireland.