My American friends ask me this time ever year if we celebrate Halloween in Ireland and this never ceases to surprise me. The story is a bit complicated as Halloween is a Celtic festival that was exported to the US and then re-imported in a much modified [more commercial] form back to Ireland and the UK. When I was young, back in the 1950s, Halloween was not really celebrated outside a religious context [which removed much of the fun] but this changed over a period of about twenty years and there is now no real difference between Halloween in the US and Halloween here in Ireland.
Today's Halloween customs are thought to have been influenced by folk customs and beliefs from the Celtic-speaking countries, some of which are believed to have pagan roots. Jack Santino, a folklorist, writes that "there was throughout Ireland an uneasy truce existing between customs and beliefs associated with Christianity and those associated with religions that were Irish before Christianity arrived".
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