Got this

book yesterday. I have been looking for an encyclopedia of Irish myth for years, having read, amongst others, Yeats' Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth, as well as Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds. The second of these, with it's reliance on more than a passing knowledge of the characters and tropes of Irish myth, as well as its confusing narrative structure, is especially challenging.
However, the most intriguing for me is that the mythical stories are set within (on the whole) identifiable parts of modern Ireland, and it is possible to visit the sites mentioned in the stories - Westmeath promotes itself as a 'land of lake and legend'. This is just one part of the legends that survives to this day - hurling has been mentioned below, and leprechauns are as popular as ever, but, idly flicking through the book on the Tube this morning, I was struck by how many of the mythic Gaelic names are still in use today - many of the stereotypically 'Irish' (from British point of view) surnames exist in their original Gaelic forms in the cycles of stories, and many of the heros have names that are still common currency today.