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Tag Archives: Irish Clans


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Death of Terence O’Brien, Catholic Bishop of Emly

Terence Albert O’Brien (Irish: Muiris Ó Briain Aradh), Irish priest of the Dominican Order and Roman Catholic Bishop of Emly, dies on October 30, 1651.

O’Brien is born into the Gaelic nobility of Ireland at Cappamore, County Limerick in 1601. Both of his parents are from the derbhfine of the last Chief of the Name of Clan O’Brien Arradh and claim lineal descent from Brian Boru. His family owns an estate of 2,500 Irish acres centered around Tuogh, which is later confiscated by the Commonwealth of England. He joins the Dominicans in 1621 at Limerick, where his uncle, Maurice O’Brien, is then prior. He takes the name “Albert” after the Dominican scholar Albertus Magnus. In 1622, he goes to study in Toledo, Spain, returning eight years later to become prior at St. Saviour’s in Limerick. In 1643, he is provincial of the Dominicans in Ireland. In 1647, he is consecrated Bishop of Emly by Giovanni Battista Rinuccini.

During the Irish Confederate Wars, like most Irish Catholics, O’Brien sides with Confederate Ireland. His services to the Catholic Confederation are highly valued by the Supreme Council. He treats the wounded and supports Confederate soldiers throughout the conflict. He is against a peace treaty that does not guarantee Catholic freedom of worship in Ireland and in 1648 signs the declaration against the Confederate’s truce with Murrough O’Brien, 1st Earl of Inchiquin, who has committed atrocities such as the Sack of Cashel against Catholic clergy and civilians, and the declaration against the Protestant royalist leader, James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, in 1650 who, due to his failure to resist the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland is not deemed fit to command Catholic troops. He is one of the prelates, who, in August 1650 offers the Protectorate of Ireland to Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine.

In 1651, Limerick is besieged and O’Brien urges a resistance that infuriates the Ormondists and Parliamentarians. Following surrender, he is found ministering to the wounded and ill inside a temporary plague hospital. As previously decided by the besieging army, O’Brien is denied quarter and protection. Along with Alderman Thomas Stritch and English Royalist officer Colonel Fennell, he is tried by a drumhead court-martial and sentenced to death by New Model Army General Henry Ireton. On October 30, 1651, O’Brien is first hanged at Gallows Green and then posthumously beheaded. His severed head is afterward displayed spiked upon the river gate of the city.

After the successful fight that is eventually spearheaded by Daniel O’Connell for Catholic emancipation between 1780 and 1829, interest revives as the Catholic Church in Ireland is rebuilding after three hundred years of being strictly illegal and underground. As a result, a series of re-publications of primary sources relating to the period of the persecutions and meticulous comparisons against archival Government documents in London and Dublin from the same period are made by Daniel F. Moran and other historians.

The first Apostolic Process under Canon Law begins in Dublin in 1904, after which a positio is submitted to the Holy See.

In the February 12, 1915 Apostolic decree, In Hibernia, heroum nutrice, Pope Benedict XV formally authorizes the formal introduction of additional Causes for Roman Catholic Sainthood.

During a further Apostolic Process held in Dublin between 1917 and 1930 and against the backdrop of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, the evidence surrounding 260 alleged cases of Roman Catholic martyrdom are further investigated, after which the findings are again submitted to the Holy See.

On September 27, 1992, O’Brien and sixteen other Irish Catholic Martyrs are beatified by Pope John Paul II. June 20th, the anniversary of the 1584 execution of Elizabethan era martyr Dermot O’Hurley, is assigned as the feast day of all seventeen. A large backlighted portrait of him is on display in St. Michael’s Church, Cappamore, County Limerick, which depicts him during The Siege of Limerick.


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The Battle of Doire Leathan

The Battle of Doire Leathan takes place on September 14, 1590, at Doire Leathan (English: Derrylahan), a townland and hamlet located between Kilcar and Carrick in southwestern County Donegal in the Irish province of Ulster.

Doire Leathan is on the eastern shores of Teelin Bay, being just across from the village of Teelin. The battle is part of the ongoing succession dispute for the leadership of the Gaelic lordship of O’Donnell. A combined force of Irish clans and Scottish Redshank mercenaries hired by Iníon Dubh (pronounced “In-neen Doo”) defeat and kill Sir Domhnall Ó Domhnaill (Sir Donnell O’Donnell). The Tanist of Tír Conaill, Sir Domhnall’s younger half-brother and Iníon Dubh’s son, Red Hugh O’Donnell, is still imprisoned in Dublin Castle, but later rises following a subsequent escape to lead Clan O’Donnell and is a prominent figure during the Nine Years’ War.

According to the Annals of the Four Masters, “The son of O’Donnell, i.e. Donnell, the son of Hugh, son of Manus, son of Hugh Duv, son of Hugh Roe, son of Niall Garv, son of Turlough of the Wine, attempt to depose his father, after he had grown weak and feeble from age, and after his other son had been imprisoned in Dublin; so that Donnell brought under his power and jurisdiction that part of Tirconnell from the mountain westwards, i.e. from Bearnas to the River Drowes; and also the people of Boylagh and Tir-Boghaine. It was a cause of great anguish and sickness of mind to Ineenduv, the daughter of James Mac Donnell, that Donnell should make such an attempt, lest he might attain the chieftainship of Tirconnell in preference to her son, Hugh Roe, who was confined in Dublin, and who she hoped would become chief, whatever time God might permit him to return from his captivity; and she, therefore, assembled all the Kinel-Connell who were obedient to her husband, namely, O’Doherty, with his forces; Mac Sweeny-na dTuath (Owen Oge), with his forces; and Mac Sweeny Fanad, with his forces; with a great number of Scots along with them. After Donnell O’Donnell had received intelligence that this muster had been made to oppose him, he assembled his forces to meet them. These were they who rose up to assist him on this occasion: Mac Sweeny Banagh (Donough, the son of Mulmurry); a party of the Clan Sweeney of Munster, under the conduct of the three sons of Owen, the son of Mulmurry, son of Donough, son of Turlough, and their forces; and O’Boyle (Teige Oge, the son of Teige, son of Turlough), with all his forces, assembled. The place where the son of O’Donnell happened to be stationed along with these chieftains was Doire-leathan at the extremity of Tir-Boghaine, to the west of Gleann Choluim Cille. The other party did not halt until they came to them to that place; and a battle ensued between them, which was fiercely fought on both sides. The Scots discharged a shower of arrows from their elastic bows, by which they pierced and wounded great numbers, and, among the rest, the son of O’Donnell himself, who, being unable to display prowess or defend himself, was slain at Doire-leathan, on one side of the harbour of Telinn, on the 14th of September. Seldom before that time had his enemies triumphed over him; and the party by whom he was slain had not been by any means his enemies until they encountered on this occasion; and although this Donnell was not the rightful heir of his father, it would have been no disgrace to Tirconnell to have elected him as its chief, had he been permitted to attain to that dignity. In this conflict were slain along with Donnell the three sons of Owen, son of Mulmurry, son of Donough above mentioned, together with two hundred others, around Donnell.”

(Pictured: Hugh Roe O’Donnell, otherwise known in history and lore as Red Hugh O’Donnell)


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Birth of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Diplomat, Poet & Memoirist

Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Irish civil service diplomat, writer of Modernist poetry in the Dingle Peninsula dialect of Munster Irish, a memoirist, and a highly important figure within modern literature in Irish, is born Máire MacEntee in Dublin on April 4, 1922. Along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin, she is, in the words of Louis de Paor, “one of a trinity of poets who revolutionised Irish language poetry in the 1940s and 50s.” She has a lifelong passion for the Irish language and is one of the leading authorities on Munster Irish.

Mhac an tSaoi’s father, Seán MacEntee, is born in Belfast and is a veteran of the Irish Volunteers during the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent Irish War of Independence, and of the Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish Civil War. He is also a founding member of Fianna Fáil, a long-serving TD and Tánaiste in the Dáil. Her mother, Margaret Browne (or de Brún) of County Tipperary, is also an Irish republican and a distinguished Celticist who teaches courses in Irish literature in the Irish language at Alexandra College and University College Dublin (UCD).

Mhac an tSaoi is influenced by her stays in the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry with her uncle, Monsignor De Brún, at his parish of Dún Chaoin. Monsignor de Brún, similarly to his sister, is a distinguished linguist and Celticist, the literary translator of Homer, Dante Alighieri, Sophocles, and Jean Racine into Modern Irish, “and one of the most distinguished literary figures of his time.”

Mhac an tSaoi studies Modern Languages and Celtic Studies at UCD, before going to further research at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and at the University of Paris. She writes the famous work of Christian poetry in Munster Irish, Oíche Nollag (“Christmas Eve”), when she is only 15-years of age.

Mhac an tSaoi spends two years studying in post-war Paris (1945–47) before joining the Irish diplomatic service and is working at the Irish embassy in Madrid when she commits herself to writing poetry in Irish following her discovery of the works of Federico García Lorca.

She remains a prolific poet and is credited, along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin, with reintroducing literary modernism into Irish literature in the Irish language, where it had been dormant since the 1916 execution of Patrick Pearse, in the years and decades following World War II. Her poetry draws on the vernacular spoken by the native Irish speakers of the Munster Gaeltacht of West Kerry during the first half of the twentieth century. Formally, she draws on the song metres of the oral tradition and on older models from the earlier literary tradition. In later work, she explores looser verse forms but continues to draw on the remembered dialect of Dún Chaoin and on a scholarly knowledge of the older literature.

Mhac an tSaoi is elected to Aosdána in 1996 but resigns in 1997 after Francis Stuart is elevated to the position of Saoi. She had voted against Stuart because of his role as an Abwehr spy and in radio propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany aimed at neutral Ireland during World War II.

In 2001, she publishes an award-winning novel A Bhean Óg Ón… about the relationship between the 17th-century County Kerry poet and Irish clan chief Piaras Feiritéar and Meg Russell, the woman for whom he composed some of the greatest works of love poetry ever written in the Irish language.

Her poems Jack and An Bhean Óg Ón are both featured on the Leaving Certificate Irish course, at both Higher and Ordinary Levels, from 2006 to 2010. Her literary translation of Rainer Maria Rilke‘s Duino Elegies from Austrian German into the Irish language is published in 2013.

Mhac an tSaoi marries Irish politician, writer, and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien in a Roman Catholic wedding Mass in Dublin in 1962. This makes her the stepmother to O’Brien’s children from his 1939 civil marriage. Her mother is deeply embarrassed by the exposure of the relationship and staunchly opposes the match, as she has long been a close friend of O’Brien’s Presbyterian first wife. Despite their subsequent marriage, the exposure of their extramarital relationship ends Mhac an tSaoi’s diplomatic and civil service career. They later adopted two children, Patrick and Margaret.

She then lives with her husband in New York City, where he becomes a professor at New York University (NYU) after the Congo Crisis destroys O’Brien’s diplomatic career. He is long blamed by the United Nations for the escalation of the Congo Crisis.

Mhac an tSaoi and her husband, who is then serving as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at NYU, are both staunchly opposed to the Vietnam War. They are both arrested by the New York City Police Department (NYPD), along with Dr. Benjamin Spock and Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, during an allegedly violent protest outside a United States military induction centre in New York City on December 5, 1967. Afterward, during an interview with The New York Times, she accuses the NYPD of using excessive force both during and after her husband’s arrest.

She later returns with O’Brien to live in Dublin, where she attends another protest rally against the Vietnam War along O’Connell Street in 1969.

Mhac an tSaoi dies peacefully at the age of 99 on October 16, 2021, at home where she has been cared for by her daughter Margaret.


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The Battle of Glenmalure

The Battle of Glenmalure (Irish: Cath Ghleann Molúra) takes place in Glenmalure, a steep U-shaped glacial valley in County Wicklow that is surrounded by forests and bogs, on August 25, 1580, during the Desmond Rebellions. A Catholic army of united Irish clans from the Wicklow Mountains led by Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne and James Eustace, 3rd Viscount Baltinglass of the Pale, defeat an English army under Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton, at Clan O’Byrne‘s mountain stronghold of Glenmalure.

Grey had landed in Ireland with reinforcements from England to put down the rebellion. His strategy is to meet O’Byrne’s threat to the English heartland of Dublin and the Pale by attacking through the highlands to the south of the city. Against the advice of veteran commanders, he chooses to lead his army (around 3,000 strong) through lowland Kildare and into the Wicklow Mountains, with the aim of taking the fastness at Balinacor in the Glenmalure Valley.

While climbing the steep slopes of the valley, the inexperienced English soldiers are ambushed by the Irish who were hiding in the woods. The English are sniped at for a long period of time before their discipline collapses and they turn and flee down the valley. It is at this point that most of their casualties occur, as the Irish leave their cover and fall upon the English with swords, spears, and axes. Hundreds of English soldiers are cut down by the pursuing Irish as they try to escape the field. The remaining English have to fight a rearguard action for several miles until they reach the town of Rathdrum.

Irish sources state that around 800 English soldiers are killed, though the English put their losses at 360 dead. Among those killed is Peter Carew, cousin of his namesake colonist who had made claims to, and won, large tracts of land in southern Ireland. The remainder of the English force retreat to lowland Wicklow and from there to Dublin. However, the following year, when offered terms, most of the Irish soldiers, including O’Byrne, come in and surrender. The exception is Baltinglass, who flees to France.

The battle is commemorated in the folk song “Follow Me Up to Carlow.”

(Pictured: “Battle of Glenmalure 1580 Wicklow,” painting by Val Byrne)