Through an investigation of how a discrete item, shur, is used in Irish English, this paper contributes to the contemporary discussion of how corpora and corpus methodologies are refining our understandings and positions on Irish English as a variety. Much of how Irish English has been characterised in the past could be described as having been arrived at via expert observation and intuition. The potential of corpus investigation to both confirm and challenge intuition has long been acknowledged (cf. Hunston, 2000). Spoken corpora have also made a compelling case for careful attention to what had been hitherto considered linguistic ephemera, which we now understand as fundamental to the characterisation of a unique ‘spoken grammar’ (McCarthy and Carter, 1995). Studies of these erstwhile ephemera have yielded rich insights into the pragmatics of Irish English. Shur presents itself as an interesting case for a number of reasons: firstly, as a pragmatic marker – in the broader senses suggested by, for example, Fraser (1999), it appears to be used in a distinct way in Irish English. Pragmatic markers are frequent, polysemous and can present significant analytical challenges. While the data is abundant – a boon – adequately interpreting this abundance requires a rigorously iterative process. Secondly, investigating shur using a corpus presents the rather typical challenges – often framed as criticisms – of using corpora to investigate spoken features, such as how an item has been transcribed within a corpus and the paucity of prosodically tagged first generation spoken corpora. Using the process and framework described by Clancy and Vaughan (2012) and a one-million-word corpus of spoken Irish English, a profile of shur is presented against the backdrop of the possibilities and challenges of corpora and corpus-informed, -driven and -based research.