41 Facts About County Donegal

County Donegal is a county of Ireland in the province of Ulster and in the Northern and Western Region.

Donegal County Council is the local council and Lifford the county town.

County Donegal is named after the town of Donegal in the south of the county.

County Donegal was the home of the once-mighty Clann Dalaigh, whose best-known branch was the Clann O Domhnaill, better known in English as the O'Donnell dynasty.

County Donegal was the worst affected part of Ulster during the Great Famine of the late 1840s in Ireland.

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Partition meant that County Donegal was now almost entirely cut off from the rest of the jurisdiction in which it now found itself, the new dominion called the Irish Free State.

In June 1987, Constable Samuel McClean, a County Donegal man who was a serving member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was shot dead by the Provisional Irish Republican Army at his family home near Drumkeen.

The last boundary change of a barony in County Donegal was in 1851 when the barony of Inishowen was divided into Inishowen East and Inishowen West.

County Donegal is the most mountainous in Ulster consisting chiefly of two ranges of low mountains; the Derryveagh Mountains in the north and the Blue Stack Mountains in the south, with Errigal at 751 metres the highest peak, making it the 11th-highest county top in Ireland.

The River Erne, along with other County Donegal waterways, has been dammed to produce hydroelectric power.

The majority of County Donegal has a temperate oceanic climate, with upland areas in the Derryveagh and Blue Stack ranges classified as oceanic subpolar.

The mountains of County Donegal are among the cloudiest places in Ireland, and northern County Donegal is the windiest.

Atlantic ocean has a significant cooling effect and, due to the county's long, thin shape and punctuated coastline, nowhere in Donegal is particularly far from the ocean, giving it a generally cooler climate that is more similar to western Scotland than the rest of Ireland.

The oldest rocks on mainland County Donegal are a quartzo-feldspathic paragneiss found around Lough Derg, which have been dated to 1.

County Donegal's landscape was carved out by glaciation at the end of the Pleistocene and the subsequent retreat during the early Holocene.

County Donegal contains one of Ireland's three glacial fjords at Lough Swilly, the others being Carlingford Lough and Killary Harbour.

The area south of County Donegal town, where the River Eske flows into the bay, is an example of one of these outwash areas.

Sea levels in the area began to stabilise around 5,000 years ago, and the balance of erosion and deposition along County Donegal's coastline resulted in the development of many sandy beaches and spits interspersed with jagged sea cliffs.

Donegal County Council has responsibility for local administration, and is headquartered at the County House in Lifford.

Donegal County Council sends three representatives to the Northern and Western Regional Assembly.

County Donegal has traditionally been a stronghold for Sinn Fein, and despite their poor performance nationally in the 2019 Irish local elections, they retained their share of the vote in County Donegal, dropping just 0.

County Donegal voters have a reputation nationally for being "conservative and contrarian", and have often voted against amendments to the Irish constitution which received broad support in the rest of Ireland.

The trend first emerged in 1958, when voters in County Donegal overwhelmingly voted to alter the electoral system from proportional representation to first-past-the-post in a referendum which was defeated nationally.

In May 2018, Donegal was the only county in Ireland to vote against the repeal of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution which had acknowledged the right to life of the unborn.

County Donegal is in the Midlands–North-West constituency for elections to the European Parliament.

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The County Donegal lasted until 1960 as it had largely dieselised its passenger trains by 1951.

County Donegal is served by both Donegal Airport, located at Carrickfinn in The Rosses in the west of the county, and by City of Derry Airport, located at Eglinton to the east.

The Irish spoken in the County Donegal Gaeltacht is of the Ulster dialect, while Inishowen used the East Ulster dialect.

County Donegal Irish has a strong influence on learnt Irish across Ulster.

County Donegal is well known for its songs which have, like the instrumental music, a distinctive sound.

County Donegal has a long literary tradition in both Irish and English.

Authors in County Donegal have been creating works, like the Annals of the Four Masters, in Irish and Latin since the Early Middle Ages.

County Donegal was thought of as the original freethinker by George Berkeley.

In modern Irish, County Donegal has produced a number of, authors such as the brothers Seamus O Grianna and Seosamh Mac Grianna from The Rosses and the contemporary Irish-language poet Cathal O Searcaigh from Gortahork in Cloughaneely, and where he is known to locals as Guru na gCnoc "Guru of the Hills".

County Donegal is known for its textiles, whose unique woollen blends are made of short threads with tiny bits of colour blended in for a heathered effect.

County Donegal was voted number one on The National Geographic Traveller 'cool list' for 2017,.

The County Donegal Gaeltacht has traditionally been a very popular destination each summer for young people from Northern Ireland.

Many County Donegal students attend the Limavady Campus of the North West Regional College and the Omagh College of Further Education of South West College.

In 2007, County Donegal won only their second national title by winning the National Football League.

On 24 April 2011, County Donegal added their third national title when they defeated Laois to capture the National Football League Division Two, they added another Division Two title in 2019.

Athletics has been one of the most successful sports in Donegal over the years with numerous athletes from County Donegal going on to represent Ireland at the international level, with at least five winning medals at major events.