Glossary: G

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

GAA, the: Founded in 1884, the Gaelic Athletic Association is an institution dedicated to fostering Irish games like hurling and Gaelic football. Widely held to be one of the most successful amateur sporting groups in the world. Although the grass-roots levels of the GAA are, in the main, comprised of very community-minded men and women willing to give large chunks of their free time over to promotion, training, and fund-raising, the upper echelons of the Association are filled with the worst sort of ditch-brained sectarian muck savages whose greed and venality is proverbial-- most Irish people reckon GAA stands for Grab All Association. Famous for not permitting non-Gaelic games to be played on their facilities and for banning members of the British security forces in Northern Ireland from joining (a lovely piece of narrow-minded sectarianism that is really going to help the fucking Cause), the GAA is a victim of its own success, in that the goodwill and and dedication of its local organisation more than compensate for the greed, incompetence and bigotry of its so-called executive. Many people would see the problems of the GAA as being the problems of Irish society in microcosm.
Gaelic football: Variant of football played in Ireland that combines the most violent aspects of soccer and rugby and is much more fun than either.
Galway: City in the west of Ireland. Galway is smaller than either Dublin or Cork. Popular weekend destination for hordes of drinkers.
Gansey-load: Lots, plenty. Gansey-- properly geansaí-- is the Irish word for a jumper/ sweater/ pullover/ whatever. Apparently dates back to the rare oul' times when young gasoors would raid orchards; a gansey-load of apples was the amount one could carry by turning up the front of one's jumper to make a sort of pouch.
Gasoor, gasoon, garsoon: Young boy. From the Irish word garsún meaning "boy", possibly derived originally from the French word garçon. Commonly used outside of Dublin.
Gee: (pronounced with a hard "g") The female genitals.
Geebag: Stupid or unpleasant person. See gobshite.
Gee-eyed: Very drunk. See drunk.
Get off the smack!: (Dublin) Expression of contempt or disbelief, uttered in response to an outrageous or obviously false statement. The implication is that the maker of the statement must be on drugs to have made it.
Gick: (n.) Excrement. A favourite song from the author's childhood, sung on school excursions and the like, went as follows (to the tune of Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz):
It runs down your legs!
Gick gick tra-la!
It's brown and it's thick!
Gick gick tra-la!
It makes you so sick!
Gick gick tra-la!

repeated with harmonies, improvisations, etc. until the supervising teacher or bus driver screamed and threatened GBH. Ah, happy days! Who says the ancient Irish art of minstrelry is dead?
Also used in the phrase, "gives me the gick", used to describe something deeply distressing and distasteful, e.g. "those feckin' TDs really give me the gick".
Gobshite: Stupid person. The Irish language has quite a staggering number of colourful and inventive words for describing the mentally inept. It's a sort of specialisation, like the Eskimo language that has sixty words for `snow'; the Irish, having so many idiots in their midst, needed a large number of words to catalogue the gradations of galloping stupidity and imbecility exhibited by their countrymen.
Gombeen: Originally, a gombeen man was a sort of rural loan-shark. Nowadays, it has come to mean just about any sort of petty underhand or corrupt activity (or the mindset possessed by those engaged in such activities) practiced by culchies, e.g. pulling strokes or fiddling EU subsidies.
Gooter: Penis.
Gorman, the: Grangegorman, a psychiatric hospital in Dublin.
Gouger: Aggressive, unpleasant person. See gurrier. Apparently arose from the practice among Dublin criminals of the 19th and early 20th centuries of gouging out the eyes of their victims.
Graw: (from the Irish word grá) Love.
GUBU: Acronym for Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, Unprecedented. The words uttered by Taoiseach Charles J. (CJ) Haughey (a politician of breathtaking crookedness and amorality, some of whose exploits are described elsewhere in this lexicon) when it was discovered that a wanted murderer was hiding out in the apartment belonging to his Attorney General. Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented was putting it mildly.
Strictly speaking, this was one occasion when CJ was landed in the shite without having done anything to deserve it (though he might've appointed an Attorney General with a bit more cop-on). However, the term GUBU was coined by Haughey's enemies in the press (of which there were-- and are still-- many) to describe a sort of self-generating crookedness. Basically, they believed that Haughey and his cronies were so corrupt that scandal would spontaneously gravitate towards them, like some sort of Black Hole of Depravity. While this may strike some foreign readers as being a bit unfair to the man, it was actually a reasonable working hypothesis during much of Haughey's political career.
Gurrier: Rough, aggressive person, scumbag. In medieval Dublin, a gurrier or gurryer was, apparently, a worker in the city's leather industry whose job it was to beat the tanned hides so they were supple enough to be worked. Needless to say, a guy whose job it was to whack smelly lumps of dead animal all day long was likely to be a) built like a brick shithouse and b) a few cans short of a six-pack, so the word came to signify any person it was probably better to avoid.