Glossary: H

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Hard-chaw: A person who is, or fancies themselves to be, a tough character. The Dublin equivalent of a "wide boy" or a "wiseguy".
Herald, the: The Evening Herald, Dublin's evening newspaper. A member of the Independent Media Group stable, the tabloid Herald is everything you might expect, and less. Very few people buy it for anything other than its classified ads. The Herald's favourite editorial trick to spice up its tired circulation figures is to drum up some "Reefer Madness" style hysteria about the drug problem in Dublin in a series of sensational articles, after which it disappears below the radar again.
Hollow leg: Someone with a great appetite for alcohol is often said to have a hollow leg.
Holy Joe: Sanctimonious person. The Irish are still quite a devout people, the malign influences of the Celtic Tiger and Dublin 4 notwithstanding, but tend to look on overt displays of piety with distaste and suspicion.
Hooley: A loud and particularly riotous party or celebration. Apparently, the word isn't Irish at all; it's Hindustani.
Hurling: The Irish national sport, sort of like hockey on PCP. Hurling involves two teams of fifteen very large culchies beating the crap out of each other with large sticks for 70 minutes. Is that entertainment, or what? Actually, there's a bit more to it than that, involving a leather-covered ball that feels like it's made of concrete and something about scoring goals and points, but when you get down to it, it's about chasing people around a field with a stick. Hurling is meant to be the fastest field game in the world-- and why wouldn't it be, with a stick-wielding muck savage the size of a small car bearing down on you with murder in his piggy eyes? Many Irish people think that hurling was the reason why the Romans never invaded Ireland; they discovered what we did for fun and decided it was better not to see what we did in a fight.
A slightly more sedate version of hurling called camogie is played by women. In Scotland, they play a similar game called shinty.