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Famous Irish Vegetarians

We are compiling a page of famous vegetarians with links to Ireland. If you have anything to add, please mail us.

It is often very difficult to assess the lifestyles of people, especially historically. Information gets passed around the web and some of it is hearsay. We try to keep this list as accurate as possible.

Oliver Goldsmith
Playwright, poet, radical: Goldsmith was most famous for writing She Stoops to Conquer. It is uncertain if he became a committed vegetarian, but he wrote approvingly of the ideas behind it.

Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley
They may not have been Irish, but according to Colin Spencer in The Heretics' Feast, it was while they were living in Dublin that they became vegetarian. Percy is most famous as a romantic poet, Mary for writing Frankenstein.

William Thompson
County Cork landlord turned socialist theorist, feminist, and introducer of the cooperative movement to Ireland. His writings influenced Marx. He was in the process of converting his estate into a cooperative community on his deathbed.

George Bernard Shaw
Playwright, socialist, feminist, and Ireland's most famous vegetarian: He converted to vegetarianism in the 1880's and remained so until his death in 1950. He was actively involved in the British Vegetarian Society when living in London. He became the first Irish person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924, though he refused the money. It is said that his funeral cortege was followed by farm animals to represent the lives that he had not taken during his life.

Spike Milligan
Comic, writer: He was born in India of Irish parents, and holds an Irish passport, though he never lived here. He was most famous as scriptwriter for the Goons, and Eddie Izard has described him as the grandfather of alternative comedy. He continued to write in his old age, on the world population crisis, and on depression. (1918 – 2002 see Obituaries page.)

Eamonn Kelly
Actor, seanchai, writer. (1914 – 2001 see Obituaries page.)

Sean Hughes
Comedian and actor: Sean's show had that memorable scene where the frozen chicken he had bought in the supermarket miraculously turned into a live hen on his kitchen table, moments before he was about to microwave it. 

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