4.86mio google results for "McKay Scotland", 3.95mio for "MacKay Scotland", 7.29mio for "McKay Ireland", 4.75mio for "MacKay Ireland". And if you still remember who the fucker was that told you that age-old nursery myth about the spellings Mc and Mac having anything to do with Irish and Scottish spelling... shoot him. Now.
The
1911 Irish Census returns give 2,200 or so McKays as opposed to 300 or so MacKays. From the little that I see of the first page of query results, a lot of both groups were Scots or of Scots origin.
The more common anglicisations of
Mac Aodha in Ireland are McHugh, or Hughes, or McKee (the latter particularly in Ulster). "Mac" is probably relatively more common in anglicisations in Scotland than in Ireland, but the "Mc = Irish, Mac = Scottish" rule doesn't hold; "Mc" is more common in both countries.
