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It's true that the English discouraged the use of Gaelic in Ireland, and hence Gaelic names. But the more important factor was changes in Church policy. All across Europe in post-Reformation times, there was a great deal of worry about Catholics giving their kids some weird crypto-Protestant name, a secular name, or a nonsense name. Since many kids were named after their godparents, and some godparents had weird names, this was a problem. There had also been a bull many years ago forbidding Catholic parents in Muslim countries to give their kids predominantly Muslim names like Muhammed, even though there had of course been martyrs and saints named Muhammed too.

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So at that time (ie, not beforehand and not now), there was a strict rule that kids had to be baptized with a saint's name or the name of some Catholic holy day or theological aspect of God. The saints had to be saints in the Roman Martyrology (which did include certain Biblical OT figures). There were some exceptions where local martyrologies continued to be used for saints' names, but it took some doing by the local Catholic authorities.

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Ireland had tons of local martyrologies, but very few saints in the Roman Martyrology right after the Reformation. St. Patrick wasn't on the Universal Calendar yet, even. Difficult.

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So what happened was that people took "functional equivalent" baptismal names, and these were usually their legal names too, for use in encounters with the government or English speakers. If the priest wasn't sure about Patrick, you could use "Patricius," another saint with the same name. If not Brigit, you could use Bridget after St. Bridget of Sweden (who was named after St.

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Thanks to those who responded!

I'm neither Irish nor a specialist in Irish name usage, but I do have 18th-century Irish ancestors, and in searching birth records for them I found not one single instance of an Irish name recorded - unless you count Bridget and Patrick, which were very common. A sample of common names given to babies born between 1700 & 1800:

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Patrick, William, James, Joseph, Hugh, Michael, Henry, Daniel, David, Samuel, Christopher, John
Ann(e), Margaret, Mary, Mary Ann, Martha, Bridget, Hannah, Catherine, Jane, Ellen, Honora / Annora, Johanna

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You have to bear in mind that the parish clerks would always have recorded names in either Latin or English, not in Irish, as the use of the language was discouraged at the time by the British government, and had been for some time. And as far as I am aware, because of the commonness of the names in use, people would often have gone by 'bynames', which may well have been Irish. But for the purposes of a story, I think it's safe to assume that the majority of people in Ireland in your period would have had names like the ones I listed.

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eta: You might want to have a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language

This message was edited 6/14/2015, 9:37 AM