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Short Vowels
When these vowels are short they are pronounced this way:

The vowels a, o, u are called broad vowels;
e and i are slender vowels. In Irish we have a saying which
will help you later with spelling: “Broad with broad and slender
with slender”: this means that in any word where a broad vowel
comes before a consonant a broad vowel has to follow the consonant
too; and the same holds true for the slender vowels. You can check
it out by looking at almost any relevant Irish word and you’ll see
this rule in operation.Combinations of Vowels

Combinations of two vowels are pronounced
as follows;
(notice that some combinations sound like the long vowels above
and some like the short):

We can even have combinations of three vowels;
they are pronounced like this:

Every Irish consonant actually has
two different ways of being pronounced,
the broad way and the slender.
Broad consonants are pronounced by raising the back of the tongue
towards the soft palate (the back part of the roof of your mouth),
slender consonants by raising the front of the tongue towards the
hard palate (the front part of the roof of your mouth).
The first one contains broad b, the second
slender b. In terms of pronunciation it’s as if one put a very light
u sound (almost a w) after the first b, and a very light i sound
(almost a y) after the second b. Try doing this with all the consonants
above and feel how the position of your tongue changes as you begin
to put either that weak i or weak u after them. So, how do we know
which way to pronounce a consonant on any given occasion? We look
at the neighbouring vowel. If the vowel beside the consonant is
broad, we pronounce the consonant as broad; if the vowel beside
the consonant is slender, we pronounce the consonant slender. Thus
in the sound examples above the first one is spelled bó, the second
beo.In an attempt to help you with these different consonantal values
I’ve included in the vowel combinations above the light i or y sound
to indicate slender and where most noticeable the light u or w sound
for broad. So if you learn the vowel combinations correctly you
don’t have to worry too much about the consonant value as the appropriate
sound is already there.

Other combinations whose sounds should be
noted are the following:

The second sound change is called eclipsis and it is registered in spelling by certain consonants being placed
in front of the consonant at the beginning of a word and silencing
or eclipsing this latter consonant. Eclipsis is a very important
grammatical operation in Irish, and you should memorize what eclipses
what.
The following table gives all
the eclipses:

The affected words
are usually of one syllable and you will learn to recognize them
with practice.