The "quare wan"

Yeah I don’t think it’s a sexual reference or age group specific.

just a way through slang of referring to the girlfriend / wife

by the same token quarefella can be used by a woman to describe her boyfriend / husband..

Am I the only one who is getting visions of the four lads drinking Guinness at the Lovely Girls competition?

Quare One just refers to a woman, any woman, in my experience.

There doesn't have to be anything unusual or strange about her, which is a typically Irish contradiction.

As long as they all had a gay old time how bad?

Quare is a different meaning to queer . Quare refers to good ,attractive etc . A Quare ride is a great ride.

I often heard my dad use "quarefella" as a generic "yer man over there" type thing. Same sort of thing as yoke, didn't really have any specific meaning.

Quare in Hiberno-English has two senses.

The first sense is the same as one of the dominant English senses of queer — strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric.

The second sense, found especially in the northern half of the country, is as a positive intensifier — "there was quare sport at the wedding", meaning the wedding was great fun. It sometimes intensifies another adjective in the form of quare and — "the day was quare and hot". Quare can be used in a generally positive way to mean "good" or "remarkable", as in "he's a quare dancer" or "that one is a quare singer".

So, if someone is described as a quare wan, that could be because she is regarded as odd or eccentric, or because she is regarded with admiration or approval. You'd have to know the context to know which sense was intended, and why.

In Behan's play, the Quare Fellow (who never appears) is a prisoner who is condemned to die. The play is set in Mountjoy prison and the action takes place in the period leading up to the Quare Fellow's hanging. Characters in the play refer to him as the Quare Fellow because, probably, they want to speak respectfully of a man who is about to die.

There's no suggestion that the Quare Fellow is gay. There is another character in the play who is very camp and is probably homosexual (although that is never stated); he is "the Other Fellow".

The quare wan or the quare fella was regularly used by my parents especially when I was a child. Context was everything. Frequently it was used to converse about the subject of some local gossip or scandal which avoided using names in front of children but everyone knew who was meant. It was also used fondly to herald a welcome someone’s arrival up the lane, sometimes in reference to a parent or indeed also to speak of someone who was a little bit odd or maybe just not that well known. It was never sexual.

Some quare good explanations on this thread.