Irish Leap Year Engagement Tradition

Published in

Gone Nomad

2 min readFeb 29, 2016

We’ve been in Ireland one week and have heard about “ladies’ privilege” several times. It turns out that this ladies’ choice is a tradition where women can propose marriage only in a leap year on February 29th. We met one man who was proposed to on a TV show by his girlfriend 12 years ago. I’d never heard of this tradition until now even though it also existed in the US (as Sadie Hawkins’ day).

Tonight, we went to a poetry reading at a pub where this tradition influenced the selection of work by female poets. We enjoyed hearing poems by Eavan Bollard and Catherine Ann Cullen.

Atlantis-A Lost Sonnet | Eavan Boland

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder that a whole city — arches, pillars, colonnades, not to mention vehicles and animals — had all one fine day gone under?

Catherine Ann Cullen reads her poem 'Meeting at the Chester Beatty'

Irish poet Catherine Ann Cullen reads her poem 'Meeting at the Chester Beatty' in UCD Library's Special Collections.

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Irish Leap Year Engagement Tradition

Atlantis-A Lost Sonnet | Eavan Boland

Catherine Ann Cullen reads her poem 'Meeting at the Chester Beatty'

Irish poet Catherine Ann Cullen reads her poem 'Meeting at the Chester Beatty' in UCD Library's Special Collections.

Written by Sarah LJ