Irish kilts: the Gaelic Revival, saffron kilts and Irish tartans

Some Irish people wear kilts, mostly pipers in bands, the army and the police, and some dancers, but the sources read for this page agree the garment is not an ancient Irish one. The Scottish Tartans Museum, citing several scholars of Irish dress, dates the Irish kilt to the Gaelic Revival at the end of the 19th century, when some, though not all, Irish nationalists adopted it. Irish kilts have been solid colour, usually saffron or green, from the start. Named Irish tartans are newer again: the same museum finds none earlier than the 1960s. For the garment itself, see what is a kilt; for the Scottish types, see types of kilts.

What was worn in Ireland before the kilt

The garment most often mistaken for a kilt in early Irish pictures is the léine, a long linen tunic worn under a mantle. Wikipedia’s article describes it as reaching to the ground but gathered into pleats and belted so that it fell to the knees, with wide, open sleeves, and says it was also worn in western Scotland until the late 16th century. It cites Muiredach’s High Cross, of the 9th century, as depicting the léine and mantles, and a Dutch watercolour of about 1575 of Irish soldiers in the service of Henry VIII. The article says little is known about Irish dress before the twelfth century. It also gives léine croich, “saffron shirt”, for the saffron-yellow version, which is the likely root of the colour later used for kilts. Wikipedia does not compare the léine with the kilt, and the saffron-colour link is this page’s inference, not a statement in a source.

The museum page traces the idea of an ancient Irish kilt to the 19th century. It reports the historian Henry McClintock’s view that Eugene O’Curry, a professor of Irish history, first proposed an ancient Irish kilt in Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1860), and that the antiquarian Patrick Weston Joyce repeated it in A Social History of Ancient Ireland (1903). Kass McGann, citing McClintock, says Joyce mistranslated léine as “kilt”. The museum adds McClintock’s view that those who took the two authors at their word are not to blame, since they seemed to have ample authority.

The Gaelic Revival and the first Irish kilts

The Gaelic Athletic Association was founded about ten years before the Gaelic League, which was organised in 1893 with Douglas Hyde as its first president. The museum says individuals in both bodies looked for a national dress. The people it names:

The St Enda’s boys are reported as disliking the kilt: a former pupil, C. S. Andrews, recalled that they probably hated wearing it and were quick to resent remarks about it. Pearse’s 1900 letter, as the museum quotes it, concedes that the kilt is less authentic than the older dress. The museum’s wider conclusion is that the kilt was never widely adopted by the Irish, though it did last in pipe bands.

Pipe bands and army pipers

The museum names three bands that adopted kilts before the First World War and still exist: Black Raven, St Laurence O’Toole and Youghal. Black Raven’s founder Thomas Ashe began organising the band in 1910, asked the Belfast antiquarian F. J. Bigger to help design the uniform, and paraded in 1911 in two versions: a black tunic with a green kilt, and a white tunic with a saffron kilt. Youghal’s band began in 1914 as the Cork Hill Pipe Band, its founder having watched British army bands parade through Cork. Nationalist bands were also used to recruit for the Irish Volunteers. One writer in the Volunteers’ newspaper of February 1914 called for all members to wear the kilt.

Army dress came later than many people assume. The museum cites the Leinster Regiment’s journal of 1909, which describes its pipers’ uniform with no kilt, and a 1901 photograph of Donegal Militia pipers in scarlet tunics and blue trousers. It says two historians of Irish regiments agree that saffron kilts reached Irish regimental pipers during the First World War, before they were officially authorised. The Irish Guards received pipers in 1916 and a photograph from that year shows saffron kilts. In 1927 the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers’ pipers’ regulations called for “the saffron kilt, pleated all around”, and by the Second World War the Irish piper’s kit was standard: saffron kilt, green caubeen (a soft hat) and a cloak, the brat. The museum adds that the Irish Army and Air Corps still maintain pipers.

Not everyone approved. The museum quotes Francis O’Neill, the collector of Irish music, mocking the idea that a man with a set of warpipes and a kilt could pass for an Irish piper.

Solid colour, and why that is not an Irish invention

Because Irish pipers wear solid kilts, some people assume a solid kilt is itself Irish. The museum says the opposite: solid kilts have been worn in Scotland for centuries, and the earliest it knows of is a portrait of Sir Duncan Campbell of Lochow painted in 1635. They were simply less popular there than tartan. It also reports that the Irish kilt was a solid colour from the start and that, until recent decades, “Irish kilt” meant a solid one.

Irish tartans

Tartan cloth itself was worn in Ireland long before the revival. The museum describes the Dungiven outfit, found near Londonderry in 1956: fragments of a cloak, doublet and trews, dated by the Ulster Museum to about 1600–1650. The trews were probably tailored in Scotland while the cloth was woven in Ireland, though the museum notes that Scottish settlers in Ulster could have made it. A textile expert reproduced the pattern for a 1958 exhibition, and the museum suggests that exhibition may have started the “Irish tartan” phenomenon, since it finds no named Irish tartans before then.

The museum’s conclusion is that every known Irish family and regional tartan dates from the 1960s or later, that many were made by recolouring Scottish designs, that several were made and sold by Scottish firms, and that their success has been mainly outside Ireland. It states that none of the county or “national” tartans has official standing with the Irish government, and that most family tartans have no formal link to the families named. For how tartan associations work in general, see who can wear which tartan.

What the sources do not settle