Is it tá tuirse orm or tá mé tuirseach? Both are correct, both are native, and here is what over a thousand years of Irish, and 100 million words of modern Irish, actually show.

I get asked this one a lot. Is it tá tuirse orm or tá mé tuirseach? Or tá tuirseach orm?

I recently published a note on this on Substack and so many comments said they thought tá mé tuirseach was wrong.

So, which is right, which do native speakers actually say, and is one of them just Béarlachas (copying English)?

Most people remember being told in school that feelings are always "on you" in Irish, so tired has to be tá tuirse orm. That is true. But there is another perfectly correct way too.

In short: both sentence structures are correct.
Tá tuirse orm (there's tiredness on me)
and
Tá mé tuirseach (I am tired)
It is NOT correct to say 'tá tuirseach orm'.

Both are correct, both are native, and both have been in the language for a very long time.

BUT, I went and did the research for you anyhow.

The basics first

If you are brand new to Irish, here are the few words you need for this article. The pronunciations are rough, just enough to get you going.

Where the two structures come from

Tá tuirse orm literally means "there is tiredness on me." This is the classic Irish way of talking about feelings and states.

Tá ocras orm (hunger is on me). Tá eagla orm (fear is on me). Tá áthas orm (joy is on me). The idea is that these things are on you for a bit of time, but you are not those feelings.

This pattern goes right back to Old Irish, over a thousand years ago, with the little word for (which became our modern ar, meaning "on").

Tá mé tuirseach uses tuirseach as an adjective, a describing word, the same way you would say tá mé fuar (I am cold) or tá mé tinn (I am sick). A lot of people assume this is copying the English language. It is not.

The word toirsech (the old spelling of tuirseach) turns up in the Würzburg Glosses, written around the year 800, in exactly this adjective form: ná ba thoirsech, "do not be toirsech." The difference back then is that the word actually meant sad or sorrowful, not tired. The "tired" meaning came later. You can still hear the old meaning in phrases like croí tuirseach (a heavy heart) and in the old sigh mo thuirse! (alas!).

So both structures are ancient Irish. Neither one is copying English. One is the feeling being on you, the other is the adjective describing you.

What real Irish actually shows

I went into Corpas Náisiúnta na Gaeilge, the national corpus of Irish. It is a collection of around 100 million words of real Irish from 2000 to 2024: books, TG4 subtitles, newsletters, blogs, social media posts.

Here is what came back:

That's roughly five to one in favour of tá mé tuirseach. And these aren't textbook examples. They're novels from Cló Iar-Chonnacht and An Gúm, TG4 programmes, even a parish newsletter from Baile Mhuirne in the Cork Gaeltacht. Mostly native and fluent speakers writing and speaking naturally.

A fair chunk of the adjective hits are tá mé tinn tuirseach de (I'm sick and tired of), which only works with the adjective. You can't build that phrase with the noun at all.

I also searched the two words on their own. Tuirseach turns up 2,563 times (the corpus tags 2,362 of those as an adjective, and a couple of hundred as a noun meaning a tired person). Tuirse turns up 1,229 times. So the adjective is used about twice as often overall. The noun does appear in other phrases though: bhí tuirse air (he was tired), bhuail an tuirse í (tiredness hit her), tuirse bheag (a bit tired), tuirse aigne (mental tiredness).

The standard Irish English dictionary, Ó Dónaill, lists both too. Under tuirse you get tuirse a bheith ort (to be tired). Under tuirseach you get tá an duine bocht tuirseach (the poor fellow is tired) and marbh tuirseach (dead tired).

One note on the numbers. A corpus search for tá tuirse orm only catches that exact wording. It misses bhí tuirse orm (I was tired), tháinig tuirse orm (I got tired), tá tuirse an domhain orm (I'm wrecked) and so on, just as the other search misses bhí mé tuirseach (I was tired). Even allowing for that, the adjective comes out as the more common everyday choice.

But there are some caveats

The real question is whether the feeling has an adjective that people actually use.

Tired does. Tuirseach is an everyday adjective. So both tá tuirse orm and tá mé tuirseach are fully natural, and speakers swap between them.

Hungry doesn't, not really. Ocrach (hungry) exists in the dictionary, but tá mé ocrach is not heard very often. It is nearly always tá ocras orm (there's hunger on me). Same with thirst (tá tart orm), fear (tá eagla orm) and sleepiness (tá codladh orm). In these cases, the adjective form is not used as much.

Angry sits somewhere in the middle. Tá fearg orm (anger is on me) is still much more common than tá mé feargach (I am angry), even though feargach is perfectly acceptable and you do hear it.

So the pattern is this. "Feeling on you" is the default for feelings in Irish. A handful of states also have a well-worn adjective, and tired is the clearest example. Where the adjective exists and people use it, you can go either way.

Do they have a different meaning?

I've heard some learners describe one of these as meaning you are more tired, or that there's more weight to the tiredness in one than the other. There's actually no proof that this is true, and it really comes down to individual preference.

Which one you should say, and which one I use

Whichever one you like. Both are right. Both are old. Both are what native speakers say.

Personally, I use tá mé tuirseach the most. It's the one I use around the house for saying "I'm tired." If I'm asking my daughter if she is tired, I honestly switch between An bhfuil tú tuirseach? (are you tired?) and An bhfuil tuirse ort? (is there tiredness on you?), and the answer to both is the same. Both use the verb bí (to be), so the answer is tá for yes and níl for no. I have a whole other article on yes and no in Irish here.

Tá mé tuirseach (verb + subject + adjective) is a nice easy structure to start with, and you can make so many sentences like it. I start with a lot of these in Irish for Beginners because they are everyday, useful and easy.

If you'd like a completely free start to learning Irish, you can try the first lessons of Irish for Beginners here.

Start Irish for free

Anyway, which one did you learn in school? I would love to know.

Le dea-ghuí,
Jenny
Founder of Gaelscoil Online

Sources: Corpas Náisiúnta na Gaeilge; Ó Dónaill, entries for tuirseach and tuirse; Old Irish toirsech (eDIL); the Würzburg Glosses; Daltaí forum discussion.