I'm not exactly looking for a translation; more like the etymology of the word "parlour" in Ireland. I think of it as a sitting-room or somewhere where people gather to chat. However, other than the song "If you're Irish, come into the Parlour" (!), I can't seem to find any reference to it. Ideally, I'd like an internet reference; failing that, some other reputable reference would be great.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh.

Like the English term "parlour", parlús has largely fallen into disuse in favour of other terms (seomra suite, etc.). Its heyday was the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. You won't find parlús in a lot of books for learners because the majority of Irish speakers in the past century tended to be less well-off and wouldn't need a term for a room which their home didn't have -- the parlús was a place where one entertained guests rather formally.

Although there may have been some fancy parlours here & there in cities of Ireland a century ago, one expects they were rare . . . hence your failure to find many references to that term. Parlús did, however, get a lot of use in the 1928 Linguaphone course, which, if you've never seen it before, used a common set of illustrations and storylines (whichever language you were studying), and only the language used in the stories varied. The illustration of the parlour in the Linguaphone course of the '20s seems to belong to 1920s New York or London, not Ireland.

"used a common set of illustrations and storylines (whichever language you were studying), and only the language used in the stories varied."

sounds like Rosetta Stone

sounds like Rosetta Stone

And 1920s multi-media, too! It featured a book, 78 rpm records and a heavy hand-crank player for those travellers determined to take their course along for the trip.

Reusing the images & stories was/is a very cost-conscious way to handle things if you're a company planning to offer courses in many languages; unfortunately some images chosen for the course may have little relevance in the culture of the language you're learning.

Imagine the stylishly dressed characters in the following illustration blissfully making their holiday plans in the early years of the Irish Free State -- a society still recovering from its fight for independence and the ensuing civil war:

http://www.gaeilge.org/109.jpg

A fortnight's adventure in 1920s Spain was just the thing to escape the tedium of entertaining the finer folk in one's Dublin parlús.

When did use of the traditional script finally really fall away? I thought by the Roaring 20's it would've been a goner. Guess not!

When did use of the traditional script finally really fall away? I thought by the Roaring 20's it would've been a goner. Guess not!

My first edition copy of Progress in Irish (circa 1960) is in seanchló. Nevertheless, I have other textbooks from the '50s that had begun using Roman typefaces, and a few from even earlier decades; the transition doesn't seem to have happened all at once.

If you look at some of the works of Shán Ó Cuív (grandfather of the current Gaeltacht Minister) written in his Leitriú Shimplí in the first half of the last century, he had incorporated use of Roman type along with his proposed orthographic revisions.

And I seem to recall there's some work from the 19th or 18th century that used Roman type for the Irish -- perhaps someone here with a better memory than mine will tell us the title?

A quick google via Vincent's site www.scribhinn.org gives this article

http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/lisa/publications/008/v3_2005-1_085staunton.pdf

The script was not phased out of printing until the 1960's.