Bram Stoker's Dracula - more Irish than Transylvanian?

It has inspired more than 1,000 movies and after the bible it's the biggest selling book of all time. But does Bram Stoker's gothic novel Dracula owe more of its inspiration to Ireland than to Transylvania?

Was Count Dracula really a bloodsucking Irish landlord who preyed on his19th century tenants? And were the undead and the gaunt haunted figures that fill the pages of Stoker's famous book straight out of Ireland's Great Famine?

These are the claims of director of the Bram Stoker's Dracula Organisation Dennis McIntyre, who says that very few people know that Stoker was in fact an Irishman.

"A lot of people are under the impression that Bram Stoker was an American, an Englishman, or a Romanian, but he wasn't. He was very much an Irishman," McIntyre said in an interview with Ireland's RTE Radio 1.

First published in1897, the took has never been out of print and has been translated into over 50 different languages. But while the story of Dracula is known by every generation throughout the world, many moviegoers and readers are unaware of its origins.

It's widely believed that Bram Stoker's Dracula tells the story of the 15th century bloodthirsty Romanian Prince Vlad Dracula III, better known as Vlad the Impaler.

The Transylvanian prince earned this name because of his reputation for impaling his enemies and watching them slowly and painfully die.
But according to Dennis McIntyre there the similarities end, and with the exception of the setting the story is a very Irish one.

He points out that the name Dracula comes from the Irish word "Droch Ola", which means "bad blood". Stoker's mother was from the West of Ireland and she told Bram about a cholera epidemic in 1832 when she witness large graves and people being pushed into them with wooden poles while they were still alive.

"They were literally buried alive. Did he get the idea of the undead being one of these?" McIntyre asked. If you committed suicide in Stoker's time it was actually believed that you became a vampire unless you got the stake through the heart treatment, he added.

There was a suicide burial plot in Clontarf, Dublin, where Stoker lived. As a boy the author used to spend hours playing in that graveyard and St. Michan's Church, where the Stoker family had a burial vault. "By some atmospheric freak in this church bodies are preserved by a natural mummification or they were in the past," said McIntyre.

Bram Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847 at the height of the Great Famine. This was one of the most catastrophic events in Irish history, with hundreds of thousands of people dying from starvation and disease or emigrating in 'coffin ships' to America.

The famine may have inspired the visual characteristics of Count Dracula and also his infamous obsession with bloodsucking, McIntyre believes. "So metaphorically speaking we think that Count Dracula might be the landlord up at the big castle sucking the blood of the peasants."

Stoker's Dracula is also full of Irish symbols - storms, fog, rats, gypsies, castle, abbey, etc.