Since the 1970s there has been a burgeoning interest in Irish English, which in its development and present‐day forms yields considerable insights into language variation and change. Scholarship in the field has proceeded from an initial concern with contact and shift, and the structures they engendered, to a more usage‐based orientation, both in sociolinguistic research into contemporary varieties of Irish English and in the investigation of its specific pragmatics. The basis for this expansion has been an increase in the database for Irish English currently available in a range of corpora which provide statistics and attestations for many features and phenomena.