Grammatical Gender in Irish
Irish, similar to languages such as Spanish or French, has two grammatical genders. This basically means that in Irish, all nouns are categorised as either masculine (firinscneach) or feminine (baininscneach). This affects things such as which article to use, mutations, adjectives and pronouns.
As such, in Irish there is no concept of things or people being an ‘it’. Everything is grammatically a ‘he’ or a ‘she’.
How to tell the gender of a word
How to tell the gender of a word in Irish is generally quite straightforward. The most obvious rule is that things referring to males will be masculine (fear = man, tarbh = bull) and females will be feminine (bean = woman, bó = cow) with some exceptions such as stail (stallion) being feminine and cailín (girl) being masculine.
The easiest way however, especially for inanimate objects is by looking at the end of a word.