Bible translations into Irish-Gaelic were undertaken from the Tudor period onwards in the hope of converting the population to Protestantism, and for that reason rejected by the stoutly Catholic majority. Although in the Counter-Reformation some Catholic devotional works were translated into Gaelic by Irish Franciscans on the Continent, the proscribed and largely unprinted nature of the language meant that there was no social or economic basis for translating secular works, and as a result the literary corpus in Gaelic remained hermetically home-grown. Irish Romantic Nationalists like James Clarence Mangan did translate certain German Romantics, but into English. The first, and for a long time the only one, to undertake a Gaelic translation of a canonical world classic was Archbishop John MacHale, who translated the Iliad in 1844. A Catholic Bible translation (An Bíobla Naofa, by the priest-philologist Pádraig Ó Fiannachta) was not published until 1982.

More prevalent in the later 19th century was the use of Hiberno-English (the English dialect as spoken in Ireland) as a target language for translations. This was done mainly by representatives of the Irish Literary Revival, who wished to bridge the gap between Irish folk life and cosmopolitan culture. Lady Gregory translated some Molière plays into her “Kiltartanese” version of Hiberno-English for performance in the Abbey Theatre, and John Millington Synge used Hiberno-English not only in his plays, but also in his poetic translations of Villon, Leopardi, and Walther von der Vogelweide (posthumously published in 1909).

After the achievement of Irish independence, a state publishing company, An Gúm, was set up in 1925 to provide reading in Gaelic; it maintained a steady production of translations from English (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur) and other languages, including Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine and the short stories of Čehov.