This is a list of nicknames for the traditional counties of Ireland and their inhabitants.
[1][2] Some refer specifically to the Gaelic games county colours.
[3] A few nicknames are shared: any Connacht county playing a team from elsewhere may be dubbed "the Westerners"; London GAA or New York GAA may be called "the Exiles"; Westmeath,[2][3] Fermanagh,[4] and Cavan[5] have each been called "the Lake county".
Full often when our fathers saw the Red above the Green, They rose in rude but fierce array, with sabre, pike and skian, And over many a noble town, and many a field of dead, They proudly set the Irish Green above the English Red "O God be with the good old times when I was twenty-one In "Tyrone among the bushes", where the Finn and Mourne run When my heart was gay and merry, recked then not of care or toil Blithesome as the bells of Derry ringing o’er the sunny Foyle" But the phrase is found predating Collins in A Legend of Knockmany in William Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1845).
[89] Outside Ireland, the GAA is organised into regional bodies which have the same status as Irish counties, some of which compete in the same inter-county competitions.