Louis O’Clery’s Life of Red Hugh O’Donnell was generally unknown until Revd Denis Murphy’s 1895 English translation. Its style combined history, praise and reverence. He probably wrote the biography after 1616, perhaps as late as 1627. Louis, chief of his sept, lost his family’s Kilbarron patrimony in the Ulster Plantation. The English granted him 960 … Read more
Irish lawyer Thomas O’Sullivan wrote this description of a bardic school in a preface to the Marquis of Clanricarde’s memoirs (London, 1722): ‘The students upon thorough examination being first divided into classes, wherein a regard was had to every one’s age, genius, and the schooling had before, if any at all, or otherwise. The professors … Read more
The forebears of the O’Clerys had been kings of Connacht and later lords in Kilmacduagh diocese in south County Galway until Anglo-Norman invaders expelled them in the thirteenth century. According to historian Edel Bhreathnach, the O’Clerys and other aristocratic poets ‘. . . all belonged to families from the north and west of Ireland … Read more
Remote and inaccessible on the edge of the Arctic Circle, Iceland remained uninhabited for centuries after the nomadic hunter-gatherers of mainland Europe and Scandinavia had evolved into settled agrarian communities. Popular legend has it that the first humans to tread the shores and volcanic terrain of Iceland were Christian monks from the north-west of Ireland, … Read more
Throughout the 1880s Parnell was renowned as Ireland’s ‘uncrowned king’, while his personal life was dominated by his furtive relationship with the attractive wife of a parliamentary colleague, Captain Willie O’Shea. When Parnell was cited in the O’Shea divorce case in November 1890, his political world fell apart and Irish nationalism was plunged into turmoil … Read more