I wonder is the word convenient, meaning near, adjacent to, used outside Ulster any more? I am prompted to ask because it was common enough in "genteel" speech in the south-east when I was growing up. I recently heard a Monaghan woman say that Paddy Cole, the musician, once lived convenient to her home. The Dublin Evening Mail of February 6th, 1865, has: "It was convenient to five o'clock when I got home".
This particular use of convenient is peculiar to Ireland. The English Dialect Dictionary could find no trace of it across the water, and that great work spread its net far and wide. It is from Latin convenientem, present participle of convenire, to come together, to meet, unite etc; there was also a French convenient recorded in the 12th century, from the same source. I am tempted to speculate that our unique convenient was a product of the hedge schools, whose teachers often knew more Latin that English.
Mary McGinley from Santry, who once lived convenient to Letterkenny, wrote to ask about the verb convoy, a word used in days gone by, she says, with the special meaning "to see somebody home". Is the word a Donegal "mistake" for convey? she asks.
Days gone by? She'll be pleased to hear that I heard the verb recently in Falcarragh. It's alive and well too in Down and Antrim. It's a Scots import. Burns, in The Cotter's Saturday Night has: To do some errands and convoy her hame. It came into Scots from Old Central French convoier, which has a counterpart in Italian conviare.
Is it related to convey? Look at it this way. Although convoier was adapted into English and Scots as convoy, the latter word was "corrected" in Renaissance English to spell conveigh, implying a mistaken notion of derivation from Latin convehere, to carry; convey is simply not related to this word.
J. Macartan from Monaghan sent an interesting word he has from his father, a farmer. The word is tried, and it means colic in a horse. Tried is an anglicisation of the Irish treighid, defined by Dinneen as "a stitch, gripe or colic; a pang, bitter grief." He mentions a specific for colic in a horse: sage. "Ce gheobhadh bas agus saiste ar an gcnoc?" is an old saying, meaning "Why die when there's sage on the hill?" Sage advice, if you'll pardon the awful pun.