Tampa Bay Irish

06/10/2026

Dublin!

Stephen's Green Shopping Centre 💚☘️

06/10/2026

Glendalough!

Saint Kevin walked into this valley in the 6th century looking for solitude — and instead built one of the greatest centers of learning in the medieval world. 🦌☘️
Glendalough — from the Irish Gleann Dá Loch, meaning Valley of the Two Lakes — is one of the most hauntingly beautiful and historically significant places in all of Ireland, a glacial valley in the Wicklow Mountains that has been a place of pilgrimage, scholarship, and spiritual seeking for nearly fifteen hundred years. Saint Kevin, a monk of royal lineage who rejected the privileges of his birth to live as a hermit in the Wicklow wilderness, established his first cell here around 570 AD, living alone in a cave above the upper lake in a silence so complete that, according to legend, a blackbird once nested in his outstretched hand during prayer and he held the position without moving until her eggs had hatched. From that solitary beginning grew one of the most important monasteries in early Christian Europe — a city of learning that drew students from across Ireland, Britain, and the continent during the golden age of Irish Christianity.
At its height, the monastic city of Glendalough housed thousands of monks, scholars, and students, its scriptorium producing illuminated manuscripts of extraordinary beauty, its teachers sending graduates across Europe to found new monasteries and keep the light of learning alive during centuries of continental darkness. The Vikings raided it repeatedly — it was burned at least four times between the 8th and 10th centuries — and each time the monks rebuilt. The English finally suppressed it in 1214, but pilgrims never stopped coming. They still come today, hundreds of thousands every year, drawn by something in this valley that no amount of history has managed to diminish. 📜🌿
Have you visited Glendalough? Does the valley of County Wicklow run in your family's roots? Share your connection in the comments and follow for more stories of Ireland's sacred places and the extraordinary people who built them. ☘️✨

06/10/2026

Irish traditional music and the elbow pipes!

Every country has folk music. Only Ireland has the uilleann pipes.

The uilleann pipes — pronounced ILL-in, from the Irish word for elbow — are one of the most complex and distinctly Irish musical instruments ever created. Unlike bagpipes which are blown by mouth, the uilleann pipes are powered by bellows strapped to the player's arm and pumped with the elbow, leaving the mouth completely free.

This makes them capable of something no other bagpipe in the world can do — playing two full octaves, producing a sound that is softer, more nuanced, and more expressive than any other pipe instrument. In the hands of a skilled player the uilleann pipes can produce a sound that is simultaneously mournful and joyful, ancient and immediate.

They developed in Ireland during the 18th century and became central to Irish traditional music. During the worst years of the Penal Laws when Irish culture was actively suppressed, traditional music went underground — played in private homes, at crossroads, and at wakes. The uilleann pipes survived because the people who played them refused to stop.

UNESCO added Irish traditional music to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2023, in part recognizing the unique cultural significance of the uilleann pipes.

Have you ever heard the uilleann pipes played live? Tell us below. 👇


First comment:

06/09/2026

Flanagan's Irish Pub is going for Best Bar, Best Whiskey Bar, Best Irish Pub, Best Bar Clearwater/Dunedin, and Best Happy Hour at Best of the Bay 2026 — five categories and we could not be more thrilled! 🍀🎉

cast your nomination by clicking the links below — open daily until June 10! 🗓️🏆 Thank you Bay Area for always showing up for your local favorites ❤️🙌

https://vote.cltampa.com/drink/best-bar
https://vote.cltampa.com/drink/best-bar-clearwater-dunedin
https://vote.cltampa.com/drink/best-happy-hour
https://vote.cltampa.com/drink/best-whiskey-bar
https://vote.cltampa.com/food/best-irish-pub

06/09/2026

Ireland Forever!

🟢 Erin Go Bragh 🇮🇪

“Ireland Forever” - a phrase carried through generations, from old banners and rebel songs to parades and gatherings across the world.

Simple words, enduring meaning.



📸 Irish Roots

06/09/2026

We love an Irish session!

☘️ There's an unwritten rule in a real Irish session that most visitors don't know until they've broken it. You don't request songs. You don't interrupt between tunes. You don't put your drink on the musicians' table. You listen, you absorb, and if you're very lucky and the session is going well, someone might nod at you to join. That nod is one of the highest social honors an Irish pub can offer.

The session isn't a performance. That's the thing that takes outsiders the longest to understand. The musicians aren't playing for the room. They're playing for each other, and the room is privileged to be present for it. The tradition stretches back centuries, to a time when music was how Irish communities processed everything, grief, celebration, resistance, and memory, all of it carried in the same reels and slow airs that are still being played in the same corners of the same pubs today.

The diaspora carried it everywhere. You can find a real session in Boston, Chicago, Sydney, and Montreal if you know where to look and what to listen for. And when you find one, the etiquette is the same as it's always been. Sit down. Order a pint. Close your mouth and open your ears. Drop a comment and tell us where you found your best session outside of Ireland. Follow The Irish Remembered for more. 🎵☘️

06/09/2026

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

☘️ He didn't know if he had enough left to start over. The crossing had taken more than he'd expected, not just physically but in some deeper way that he couldn't name yet and wouldn't be able to name for years. But he kept his hand on his son's shoulder and he looked at that harbor and he found something. Not optimism exactly. Something harder than optimism. The particular Irish capacity for continuing that has no clean word for it in English but that everyone who carries Irish blood seems to recognize when they feel it in themselves.

Researchers studying post-traumatic resilience in immigrant populations have found that Irish-descent communities show measurable patterns of adaptive coping that appear to run across generations. The children and grandchildren of famine survivors demonstrate stress response profiles that differ from control populations in ways that suggest epigenetic transmission, the biological passing of survival-adapted traits from one generation to the next without any conscious teaching. The resilience isn't just cultural. It may be written into the biology.

What that means practically is this. The stubbornness you feel when everything is against you. The refusal to stay down that you can't fully explain. The way your family has always found a way through things that stopped other families cold. That didn't come from nowhere. It came from people who stood at a rail exactly like this one and found something harder than optimism when they needed it most. Drop a comment if you feel this in your own family and follow The Irish Remembered for more. 🌊☘️

06/09/2026

One of the prettiest towns in Ireland!

🇮🇪 Henry Street in glorious Kenmare in County Kerry, looking beautiful on a sunny day. Known as County Kerry's "gourmet village," it offers a highly authentic, relaxed atmosphere with top-notch dining, boutique shopping, and easy access to both the Ring of Kerry and the wild, lesser-traveled Beara Peninsula.



Photo Credit 📷 Gráinne Nic Gearailt

06/09/2026

Your morning eye opener!

☘️ The perfect Irish Coffee

Preheat your Irish coffee glass by filling it with boiling water for 5 seconds, then pour the water out.

Add 1 teaspoon of brown sugar and a good measure of Irish whiskey into the warmed glass.

Fill the glass to within 1 cm of the brim with hot, strong black coffee. Stir well to dissolve all the brown sugar.

Carefully pour lightly whipped cream over the back of a spoon so that it floats on top of the coffee.

Do not stir after adding the cream; the best flavour comes from drinking the coffee and Irish whiskey through the cream. The final step .... Enjoy 😍