This article takes a variational pragmatic approach to investigating language use in Ireland by focusing on the speech act of ‘offers’ in Irish English as compared to those in British English. Using comparable Irish and British components of the International Corpus of English, the analysis centres on the offer strategies and strategy realisations employed in these offers. The study highlights the need for corpus analyses of speech acts to include a fine-grained qualitative analysis, particularly in light of the fact that findings reveal the distribution of offer topic to differ across the Irish and British corpora and also offer realisations to differ by topic. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd