In Irish martial arts, (; meaning 'stick-fighting') (also called boiscín and ag imirt na maidí ) now refers to the various forms of stick-fighting from Ireland. Although an old term it was found by author John W. Hurley and introduced back into modern usage in the late 1990’s. Bataireacht literally means “fighting with sticks” and has no specifically “Irish” connotation at all, but Hurley thought it a convenient word to use for non-Irish speakers since it is indeed Irish and does connote fighting, or fencing, with 3 foot sticks. Definition Bataireacht is a category of stick-fighting martial arts of Ireland. The concept of people swinging sticks at each other, in anger, dates far into pre-history. It is likely to have started with the hominids that existed before homo sapiens. Neanderthals are known to have crafted heavy sticks into tools that were multi-purpose and resembled many modern Batas. Although stick-fighting is pre-historic, the vocabulary of Bataireacht can be traced back to Old Irish, one of the oldest languages in Europe. Wooden Sticks & clubs were very significant in Bronze age warfare. The Bronze Age battlefield of Tollense, in Northern Germany contained Batas made from Ash and Sloe (which is a shrub related to Blackthorn). It is believed that peasant soldiers fought largely without metal as bronze was often preserved for the prestigious warrior class of horsemen. Certainly the archaeological records demonstrate large numbers of traumatic head injuries from the Bronze age time and are different from the types of injuries inflicted in the later Classical times or the Medieval age. Bata is the Irish term for any kind of stick. In stick fighting, the actual bata or stick used for bataireacht is commonly called a shillelagh. There are a two ideas as to the origin of the word. The most popular and older one (in the English language) is that the name came from a genericization of the forest of Shillelagh, a barony situated in County Wicklow, and famous for its oak forests in the 18th century. As the oak coming from this region was in high demand, the term started to be applied to good quality sticks. This is the meaning that many British authors of the 18th and 19th centuries used when talking about shillelaghs, for example William Carleton who talked of cudgels made of "good shillelah" which had a leather thong attached. The first documentable use of the