I am often surprised to find that expressions deemed obsolete in Joseph Wright's great English dialect Dictionary are sent to me by people from the North of Ireland. One such is Oul'Mahoun, from Mary Logue who was born near Strabane but is now in exile in Dublin. It was her grandmother's term: she would sprinkle Holy Water copiously on young Mary when she was heading off for dances in Lifford and Letterkenny long ago, to keep Oul'Mahoun at bay, she would say. Your man was the Devil.
Burns, in The Diel's Away wi' the Exciseman had "An ilka wife cry'd 'Auld Mahoun, we wish you luck o' the prize, man." But Mahoun appeared in Scots literature long before Burns's time. Dunbar, in 1510 or thereabouts, has "gramercy", said Mahoun, "Renunce thy God and cum to me."
Mahoun is a form of Old French Mahon, the name of one of the principal devils. Mahon is a corruption of Mahomet, who wasn't exactly revered in the time of Crusades. Mary's granny worked in Scotland in the old days, she once shared a field with Paddy the Cope.
Pat McLaughlin, an Inishowen man now living in Haggardstown, Dundalk, was reminded by Andrew Lacey's kipe, an agricultural basket, of a word that brings back no fond memories of his own youth.
"When I was a young fellow we used a kippin' bag. This was made from a jute sack by the woman of the house. This was used for laying potatoes. The splits, sections of potatoes cut for seed, were put into the kippin' bag and you set off laying the splits along the drill, with about two stone weight of splits in the bag. This was one Godawful, back-breaking job for a youngster."
Macafee's Concise Ulster Dictionary had kibbing bag and kippie-bag. A kib was a kind of spade used for planting potatoes in stony or hilly ground where a plough could not work. A pointed pole or staff with a rest for the foot was also used for making the hole into which the splits were dropped.
This instrument was called a steeveen in Donegal: the Irish is stibhin, a borrowing from English stave, probably. Now it's my guess that kib, a borrowing from Scots kebbie, a rough walking stick, a shepherd's staff, itself from Old Norse, keppr, a cudgel, was once identical with the steeveen: when the potato spade was invented they decided that word kib would do rightly for it.