Foras Feasa ar Éirinn was written about 1630 and circulated widely in manuscript form; the printing of books in Irish being effectively forbidden by the English rulers of Ireland at the time. There have been three full translations into English:

• By Dermod O' Connor, 1723, several times republished in the 18^th & 19^th centuries.
• By John O'Mahony, 1866. This version is in print (in 2006) from Irish Roots Café.
• By David Comyn and Patrick S. Dinneen, Irish Texts Society 1902-1914. This version is also in print and can be ordered through a bookshop or via http://www.litriocht.com

            The O'Mahony and Comyn/Dinneen versions are available in book form only in very expensive multi-volume library editions. The O'Mahony translation is also available as page images (very poor quality) at Google Books

            This version is based on the Comyn/Dinneen edition. This is a scholarly version of the original Irish text, carefully collated from the best manuscripts, with a translation on opposite pages and very copious annotations. Our aim here has been to produce a reading version, so the following changes have been made.

• The Irish text is not included (it is printed in the old half-uncial alphabet and cannot be OCR'd)
• Also omitted are the variorum notes giving the different readings of various manuscripts, and alternative versions of the poems as quoted in other works.
• Corrigenda have been silently applied.
• Other footnotes and endnotes have been included in the Endnotes section. They are hyperlinked from the HTML pages.
• The index includes both page references and, for some entries, notes about the person or place etc. The notes have been collected into the Notes on People and Places section. The page references have been omitted, not being needed in an electronic edition where the text can be easily searched.
• The Table of Synchronisms has been included as page images only. This is because of its very complex layout and the Irish names being in half-uncial script.
• The Memoir of Geoffrey Keating is from the O'Mahony translation

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