TL;DR: Is bail ó Dhía ar an teach a set phrase in Irish with a set response? If so, does anybody know precisely what the response is?

When I was a child, and too young to know the value of paying proper attention, my Grandmother used to talk about an Aunt of hers, or possibly a Grandaunt. This woman may have been one of the last native speakers of of the type of Irish which would have been used around our area of Cork, and according to my Grandmother she would only speak Irish when she would come to visit the household. I think I recall my Grandmother telling me that she couldn't speak any English, though I'm not entirely sure if I'm remembering correctly at this stage, and it could be that she simply refused to speak English to her family.

In any case, my Grandmother used say that any time this woman would visit she would let herself in the front door, which would typically have been left unlocked night and day, and instead of knocking she would announce her presence by saying something along the lines of "bail ó Dhía ar an teach" or "bail ó Dhía ar an teach sa". My Grandmother, or whoever else from the household came to greet her, would then be expected to respond something like "agus ar an té a deir sé/sí é". The first part seems fairly formulaic, and reminds me of the relatively common phrase "bail ó Dhía ar an obair", but I've never heard of a set response to that, and I can't find any record of the variant with teach.

Does anybody know of this greeting being recorded anywhere? Or of a set response to it? I'm fairly confident I'm remembering the first part of it correctly, but I'm not 100% sure what she told me the response should have been. If this is a known greeting and response, I'd love to know what they were actually saying to each other back then. Thanks in advance for any insight.

Why would your grandmother's great-aunt have spoken Standardised Irish, which you say is the type of Irish spoken in your area of Cork? Was the CO found in Cork before the CO was drawn up? Ar an teach doesn't make sense in Cork Irish.

Bail ó Dhia anso isteach is the correct phrase. The answer is Dia 's Muire dhuit, or Dé bheatha-sa.

Agus ar an té adeir sé é would not be correct. Agus ar an té adeireann é would make sense.

The conspiracy runs deep.

Of course she wasn't using standardised Irish. This would have been back in the 1930s and 40s. I'm just trying to approximate something I heard over 20 years ago, that I can't remember entirely correctly.



That's great, thanks. Does it appear somewhere in Peadar Ua Laoghaire's work, or other Cork writings? Or is it still used like this in Múscraí?

Well, Bail ó Dhia anso isteach is frequently found in Ua Laoghaire's works, with the reply being as I stated. But I haven't found "agus ar an té adeireann é, "but you can't have relative and a subject pronoun there. It can't be "an té adeir SÉ é" - as the subject of the verb "deir" is the relative particle.

If it were "ar an teach", then it would be "ar an dtigh" in Cork, unless your grandmother's great-aunt spoke Standardised Irish (Gaelainn Chaighdeánaithe).

Baile ó Dhia anso isteach: pronounced Bail ó Dhia nso steach, eliding many vowels (5 syllables, not 8).

That's probably what it was then. Thanks for the insight.

Nó é seo a bhí i gceist aici:

Cuir bail ar an teaċ!

(Put the house in order!)

Níl aon freagra ceart ar sin, seachas le cic sa tóin.

Let me correct my "baile" above. It is bail, as all the other posts show. I would have corrected a few days ago, but the Korean spam artists meant this post would have been lost.