Irish Kilt?

[O'Callaghan]

All I know is that there are quite a number of nice Irish county tartans ... they are no doubt of rather recent invention but many of them look fabulous

Also I think I read that saffron colour cloth would be more yellow than the modern kilt colour but I like the modern saffron kilt (would be nice to get a kilt like that someday to represent my father's side more).

There's a very simple explanation for the difference in saffron colour. As a plant dye, it does not produce the same colour on different fabrics, and the Irish leine was made of linen, which has notoriously poor dye takeup. So saffron + linen = yellow, and saffron + wool = brownish orangey colour (which actually has a name, it's called 'ruggy' [spelling?]). Of course, modern kilts are dyed with synthetic dyes, not saffron, and cheap ones are not even made of wool, but they approximate the colour of wool dyed with saffron, and if you see someone dressed in a leine to represent the ancient Irish it will be yellow, although it's not dyed with real saffron either, although hopefully it will be linen.

As for Irish tartans, they are all fairly recent, virtually all being 1960s or later, with just a few exceptions for certain family names (not Callaghan, which only dates to 2007!). County tartans only date back to the 1990s, although there are two for every county, as two separate mills invented their own ones. Marton Mills claim that theirs are based upon the colours taken from county crests, while House of Edgar don't try to explain where theirs come from.

My ancestors being from Cork, I have researched this and can say that (officially at least) only Cork City has a crest, not County Cork, and it has NO set colour scheme atall! However, the GAA, which regulates Gaelic Football and Hurling, has a pennant and a crest for each county, and for County Cork the GAA pennant is red and white, whilst the GAA crest is the Cork CITY crest portrayed in red, blue, green and yellow, which just happen to be the colours of the House of Edgar tartan for County Cork, which doesn't claim to be based upon a county crest. So where do Marton Mills get their colour scheme from? AFAIK it is taken from the version of the Cork City crest on the shirts of the Cork City Football Club (soccer)!

I don't know what you will find if you research the other counties, but you may expect to find similarly quixotic origins, if any, for the colours of the other county tartans.