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Stories | 21 November 2025
Culture Near You: Discover Dublin's Cló Gaelach street signs
Culture Near You is an online map that highlights where culture happens and the people who make it happen, as well as featuring local stories and tips to tell you more about the city’s neighbourhoods.
We’re constantly adding to this cultural map and getting to know the great stories and people behind the city’s culture. We thought you might like to get to know them too. You can find out more about Dublin's heritage on Culture Near You.
Dr. Nicole Volmering is a historian, medievalist and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin. Since 2023 she has been running the CLÓSCAPE project investigating the history of cló gaelach street signage in Dublin city.
Nicole tells us how the initiative came about, what its value is to the people of Dublin and those who help document the city through the Cultural Audit Map.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your background as a Celticist and Historian?
As it happens most of my work is on the history of early medieval Ireland, but I interested in the history of Ireland generally. I primarily study early religious texts and early Irish manuscripts to find out what they can tell us about literate communities in early Ireland. We have a very rich body of texts in both Latin and Old Irish from medieval Ireland, including poetry, saint’s lives (like those of Brigit and Patrick), grammars, law texts, chronicles and genealogies.
Much of my research and teaching is about Irish manuscripts and book culture; I am particularly interested in how the earliest Irish manuscripts were made and how the traditional Irish script was developed. I am from the Netherlands originally, but since my passion is medieval Irish history, I moved to Dublin to study Old Irish.
Could you describe what the Clóscape project is and how it came into being?
CLÓSCAPE came out of another little project I did with colleagues in Education. The year 2022 marked the centenary of the introduction of what we call ‘compulsory’ Irish and the creation of the first national programme for education in the Free State. This of course led to many changes for teachers and students, but also for printers, and as a result it fed into a long-standing debate about which typeface should be used to print Irish: the cló gaelach, based on traditional Irish script, or the ‘English’ typeface. It is quite a divisive topic!
We published a book on the history of Irish education last year 'Irish in Outlook: A Hundred Years of Irish Education', and it was my work on the cló gaelach for this book that inspired me to investigate the use of the traditional Irish font in Ireland today.
Officially, the cló gaelach was abandoned in the 1970s under the banner of ‘modernity’, but as you can see – it is still everywhere around you on the streets of Dublin.
The signs may seem ordinary, but they are actually an important part of Irish history themselves as they were initially intended as a form of protest against a British administration that tried to suppress the use of Irish in public spaces. For this reason it is rather sad that they are replaced with modern signage when they break: a little bit of that history is then lost. The CLÓSCAPE project is trying to preserve them (digitally) for the future by collecting both modern and historic photographs of the signs.
Can you explain a bit more about Cló Gaelach street signage for those unfamiliar with it?
The signage you see on the streets of Dublin was first produced around the turn of the century. This largely came about because of lobbying by the Gaelic League and other nationalist parties. This campaign went more or less hand with a campaign to rename Dublin street names, as many were named after important Englishmen rather than Irishmen. The general aim was to make Irish history and the Irish language visible on the streets of Dublin. As Irish, when handwritten, was traditionally written in Irish script – the same script you can see in medieval Irish manuscripts! – the street signs were produced in the cló gaelach.
Why is the Clóscape project important to the people of Dublin in your opinion?
Many people who have contacted me about this project recognise the historic value of the signs and the fact that the script and the cló gaelach are an important part of Irish heritage. Sometimes they also have important memories associated with them. Generally people tell me that they are really fond of seeing that bit of history on their streets.
The English administration was generally unhappy with any form of Irish writing in the public space and tried to ban it on the grounds that the font was ‘illegible’.
What has been the reaction to and engagement with the activity thus far?
There has been a huge response and I can still trying keep up with all the emails! Many people are excited to share photos from their own area and some have even contacted me about rescuing signs that are about to be lost because of damage or building works.
Beyond 2025, what are you hoping to do with the data submitted through the research page on your site?
The photos of the street signs, together with the historical information I can find about them, will be made available on the Digital Repository of Ireland, so that anyone can see and research them. In the future I would then like to see that collection expanded with photos from across Ireland, and, with a little bit of luck, perhaps we can even save or restore some.
Finally, if someone wants to contribute to the Clóscape project, how can they become part of the process?
If anyone is interested in contributing modern or historic photographs, has information to share about them, or wants to know more about other ways to contribute to the project, they can email me at closcape@outlook.com
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The CLÓSCAPE project is funded by the Trinity Long Room Hub Research Incentive Scheme 2023 to 2025.
You can find out about the Cló Gaelach street signs and more on Dublin’s heritage on Culture Near You.