How Irish is Halloween? And where do the traditions come from?

At its heart, Halloween is an Irish feast, though the modern iteration as we know has taken various influences from Scotland to the USA, writes Jonathan deBurca Butler

“Traditions are always changing but many of them still have the essence of Samhain,” says Jenny Butler, Lecturer in the School of Religions at University College Cork.

The tradition of, what we now call, Halloween is as ancient as the ceremonial hill sites that raged with for centuries bonfires and still dot our mysterious landscape today. But just how Irish is today’s modern celebration and how much can we claim as our own?

“At its heart, Halloween is an Irish feast,” says author Manchán Magan. “The ancient Irish festival, Samhain, is the basis of modern Halloween. Samhain meant the end of the harvest. It marked the start of winter and was the beginning of a period of darkness, with the sun weakening and spending more time in the underworld. It was thought to be the time of the year when the threshold between worlds was thinnest and that gave creatures from the underworld the chance to access our world more easily.” Often these ghosts, ghouls and fairies would venture through the fields and country roads of Ireland in search of food and unsuspecting victims to take back to the underworld as souvenirs.