Foreign-language dictionaries have their strengths and weaknesses, and Oxford Pocket Irish Dictionary (OPID) is no exception.
Among its STRENGTHS, OPID is a great compact English-Irish, Irish-English dictionary that presents quite a sizable inventory of words for the Irish-language student. There have been only a couple of occasions, so far, where I wasn't able to find the word I was looking for; e.g. the verb 'thresh' in the English-Irish section -- I eventually found in the Irish-English section that BUAIL 'strike' may be used for 'thresh'.
As modern Irish nouns are notorious for having several different forms for nominal plurals, this dictionary indicates the plural forms for the majority of the nouns covered, primarily by listing each noun's declensional class (e.g., nm1 = first declension masculine noun; nf2 = second declension feminine noun, etc.); for irregular nouns the plural is given outright -- e.g. BEAN (npl MNA, gsg MNA, gpl BAN) 'woman'. Once you know which declensional class a noun belongs to, you can look the particular declension up in the grammar section in the center of the book and find a noun's plural form. Such a system requires a little extra work, but the volume is small and space is at a premium.
Among OPID's WEAKNESES: As I'm quite myopic, I find the print pretty small; but, thank God for magnifiers. More importantly for many folks, there's NO GUIDE FOR PRONUNCIATION of Irish words in the body of the text; there's a very short pronunciation guide right after the Introduction, but it's debatable how useful such a guide is for a beginner struggling to find out how a particular word is pronounced; those who have a handle on Irish orthography and pronunciation have no need of a pronunciation guide, and so, for them, this lack is of no consequence.
For those who need a dictionary that indicates the pronunciation for each Irish word, I'd recommend
Focloir Scoile : English - Irish Dictionary (English and Irish Edition)
. The vocabulary in this dictionary is more limited than that in OPID. It gives a broad 'phonetic' transcription for each word (hewing more to the prescribed pronunciation of the Official Standard), but it at least gives you a jumping-off point for learning how to pronounce words; you can always modify your understanding about orthography and how it's connected to pronunciation once you become more familiar with the dialect you've chosen to study.
Overall, OPID is an excellent compact dictionary for students of modern Irish. For more comprehensive dictionaries, one would have to turn to works such as Niall O Donaill's
Focloir Gaeilge-Bearla/Irish-English Dictionary
for an indication of the plural of each noun citation, and to Tomas De Bhaldraithe's
English-Irish Dictionary With Terminological Additions and Corrections
for an equally good English-Irish dictionary.
I highly recommend OPID as a good dictionary choice that all beginning and intermediate modern Irish-language learners can consistently turn to for their vocabulary queries. In my experience, you'll rarely be disappointed.
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