I. The Short Answer

There is no O'Dubhda tartan. There never was, and we have not made one up. The clan-tartan system is a Scottish practice — it belongs to the Highland clans, not to the Gaelic Irish, and we have kept ourselves honest about that.

The Gaels wore wool of one or two colours. The medieval evidence — the Brehon Law tracts on dress and rank, the sixteenth-century drawings of Lucas de Heere and John Derricke, the woodcut frontispiece to Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland — shows plain, simply-banded, or striped woollens. It does not show tartan checks in the Highland sense, and it does not show particular patterns belonging to particular families.

We wear the brat instead. Our clan regalia is the brat — the shoulder-draped woollen mantle worn by our people from the early Christian period into the seventeenth century. For the 2025 inauguration we settled on a green-and-gold check brat, and any member who wants an O'Dubhda garment should write for one of those.

II. Why Not a Tartan

The Irish kilt is a late invention. The scholar H. F. McClintock, whose Old Irish and Highland Dress (Dundalk, 1943) remains the standard work, traces the idea of an “Irish kilt” to the 1860s — to Eugene O'Curry's On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish — and its public adoption to the Gaelic Revival of the late nineteenth century. It is a Scottish garment adapted for Irish nationalist pageantry; it is not a medieval Irish one.

No medieval Irish “clan tartans”. The ancient Irish did weave checked and striped wool; the evidence survives in early dye sites and in the commentary of Giraldus Cambrensis. But there is no evidence that particular check patterns belonged to particular families in the way Highland tartans did. The mapping of pattern to clan is a Scottish development, formalised in the nineteenth century.

Irish dress was organised by rank, not by blood. The Brehon Laws set the number of colours a brat might carry according to the wearer's standing — a slave one, a labourer two, a king as many as seven. A noble family did not have a private check; it had the right to more colours than its neighbours.

III. The Modern “Irish Tartans”

The county tartans. In 1996 the Scottish mill House of Edgar, responding to demand from the Irish diaspora, commissioned a range of tartans for the thirty-two old Irish counties plus an Irish National. The Sligo County, Mayo County, and Irish National tartans were all designed in 1996 by Polly Wittering of House of Edgar. They are handsome modern cloths and they are entered on the Scottish Register of Tartans — but they are not ancestral patterns. They are roughly thirty years old.

The Tara tartan. The older Murphy / Tara tartan (1978) turns out, on closer examination, to be a colour modification of MacLean of Duart. The often-cited attribution to Clans Originaux (Paris, 1880) has since been found to be spurious. It has no medieval basis.

The one genuine exception — the Dungiven burial. In 1956 a bog burial was excavated at Flanders Townland, near Dungiven in County Londonderry. The body was clothed in a checked woollen mantle and trews, woven — by all the evidence — in Ireland around the year 1640. The reconstructed check is now on the Scottish Register as the Ulster tartan, and it stands as the only surviving piece of Irish-woven tartan-like cloth from before the Gaelic Revival. It is not a clan pattern, and it is not an O'Dubhda one. But for a cousin with a Londonderry connection — the Duddy branch of our family in particular — it is the one tartan with an honest claim to Irish ground.

Honest use. A member who wants to wear a Sligo or Mayo kilt at a friendly gathering where everyone else is kilted is welcome to. We only ask the wearer to know what it is: a late-twentieth-century commercial design worn as a friendly gesture in a Scottish form, not the recovered dress of the Uí Fhiachrach.

IV. What We Wear Instead

The brat. The true ceremonial garment of our clan is the brat — set out in detail on its own page. It is woven now in a green-and-gold check on a 160 cm loom, pinned at the left shoulder, and worn at our rallies and inaugurations.

Plain wool, the old way. For ordinary wear at clan events, a plain woollen mantle — or modern clothes in the clan colours, green and gold — is the most authentic thing a member can wear. Our ancestors wore what was to hand, in the wool of the western hills; they did not wear a uniform.

V. Sources

• McClintock, H. F. — Old Irish and Highland Dress, with Notes on that of the Isle of Man (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1943).
• Dunlevy, Mairéad — Dress in Ireland: A History (Cork: Collins Press, 1999).
• O'Curry, Eugene — On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (Dublin: Williams & Norgate, 1873).
• McGann, Kass — “The Truth About Irish Kilts”, Reconstructing History (2002).
• Henshall, A. S. & Seaby, W. A. — “The Dungiven Costume”, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd ser., vol. 24–25 (1961–62), 119–42.
• Scottish Register of Tartans — entries for Sligo, County (ref 3819), Mayo, County (ref 2867), Ulster (Original) (ref 4196), and Irish National (ref 1855), tartanregister.gov.uk.
• House of Edgar, Macnaughton Holdings Ltd. — Irish County Tartan range (1996).
• Senchas Már — Brehon Law tracts on dress and rank.