Irish harp (Celtic harp)
The harp is the emblem of the Irish state: it is on Irish coins, the President’s flag and seal, and the papers of every government department. The state’s harp is modelled on the oldest surviving Irish harp, a medieval instrument at Trinity College Dublin known as the Brian Boru harp.
Meaning
The harp is Ireland’s official emblem. The Department of the Taoiseach describes it as exclusively an emblem of the State, at home and abroad. Government departments and offices always use it, it is on all Irish coins, it is engraved on the President’s seal of office, and the President’s flag shows a gold harp with silver strings on blue. Its design is based on the medieval harp at Trinity College Dublin, which the harp historian Nancy Hurrell writes was adopted as the official symbol of the Irish government in 1922. In Irish the instrument is the cláirseach, and harps were played in Ireland before Brian Boru’s time. It belongs to Ireland as a nation, and to the state that uses it.
Origin and history
The harp stood for Ireland long before there was an Irish state. Henry VIII’s groats and half-groats, introduced about 1534, were the first coins to carry it as the symbol of Ireland, according to the University of Otago Library’s exhibition on Irish books and coins, and at the same time Henry changed his title from Lord of Ireland to King.
The model for today’s emblem is the harp at Trinity College Dublin. The college dates it to the 15th century and calls it the oldest surviving Irish harp. Hurrell writes that historians from Joseph Walker, in 1786, onward agree that its carvings date it to the 14th or early 15th century, and that it is like the Queen Mary harp of the same period in the National Museum of Scotland. The Department of the Taoiseach calls it fourteenth-century. It came to Trinity in 1782, given by William Conyngham. The instrument itself is a composite of more than one harp, and in 1961 the British Museum restored it to a shape closer to the medieval original.
Was it Brian Boru’s harp?
No. Brian Boru died in 1014, the year of the Battle of Clontarf, generations before the harp was made, and Trinity College says it has “incorrectly become associated” with him. The story came with the harp. In it, Brian’s son Donnchad took his father’s harp and crown to Rome and laid them at the pope’s feet; the harp stayed at the Vatican until Henry VIII, who gave it to the first earl of Clanrickard, and after passing through families in Clare and Limerick it was delivered in 1782 to Colonel Burton Conyngham, who deposited it at Trinity. Charles Vallancey published the story in 1786, and Joseph Walker reprinted it the same year with doubts, writing that the harp’s age “is certainly very high, but I cannot think that it is so high as the age of Brian”. George Petrie, in 1840, called it “a clumsy forgery”. Eugene O’Curry, in 1873, thought the story was probably not invented but confused: the harp may have been identified as belonging to Donnchadh Cairbreach O’Brien, “sixth in descent from the great hero of Clontarf”, and the name taken for Brian’s son. The name “Brian Boru harp” has stayed with it.
The scroll on the emblem
Part of the shape people know from the emblem is a Victorian repair. In the late 19th century a plaster end piece with a scroll was added to the foot of the harp’s front pillar, Hurrell writes, and the scroll can still be seen in the national emblem and in the Guinness logo.
Where you’ll see it today
whatdoesthissymbolmean.comFlag of IrelandGreen, white and orange in equal vertical bands, green next to the pole. The Irish government says the flag stands for the inclusion of, and hoped-for unity between, the people of different traditions on the island; Thomas Francis Meagher, who flew it in 1848, said the white in the centre signified “a lasting truce between Orange and Green”.Read next
- Next in Celtic symbolsShamrockA young three-leaved clover, worn on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, and the best-known emblem of Ireland. The story that St Patrick used it to explain the Trinity is first recorded in 1681 and first printed in 1726; earlier writers mention shamrock only as something the Irish ate.
- The same shape in Thanksgiving symbolsThree SistersThe Three Sisters are corn, beans and squash grown together in the same hills, the Indigenous farming system of much of North America. The name comes from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), for whom the three crops are sisters, given to the people when they sprouted from the body of Sky Woman’s daughter.
See also
Celtic knot, Triskele, Claddagh ring, St Brigid’s cross, Pictish symbols.
Sources
- The Harp, Published 1 November 2018, Department of the Taoiseach (gov.ie)
- Brian’s Funeral and Legacy (exhibition ‘Emperor of the Irish’: Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf 1014), 2014, The Library of Trinity College Dublin, Brian Boru Harp
- The ‘Brian Boru’ harp, Nancy Hurrell, History Ireland
- Nummorum in Hibernia (exhibition Éire á Móradh: Singing the Praises of Ireland), Special Collections, University of Otago Library, Cabinet 2
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves, lines or triangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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