Songs of an Irish Poet: The Mary O’Leary Story
by
Brian Brennan
SMASHWORDS EDITION
PUBLISHED BY:
Brian Brennan on Smashwords
First published as Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire: A Poet of her People, by The Collins Press, Cork, Ireland, 2000.
ISBN 1-898256-98-5
Songs of an Irish Poet: The Mary O’Leary Story
Copyright ©Brian Brennan 1999, 2007, 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means. Electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review to print in a magazine or newspaper, or broadcast on radio or television. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, users must obtain a licence from Access Copyright.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.
About the Author
Brian Brennan is an Irish-born author and journalist who immigrated to Canada in 1966. He lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, and specializes in books about the colourful personalities and the social history of Western Canada. His maternal grandmother, Hannah Twomey (née Burke), was the great-granddaughter of Mary O’Leary. For more information, visit his website at brianbrennan.ca
Acknowledgments
This book is based on several published and anecdotal sources, the principal reference being Filíocht Mháire Bhuidhe Ní Laoghaire (literally, The Poetry of Yellow Mary O’Leary) by An tAthair Donncha Ó Donnchú (Fr. Denis O’Donoghue) MA, who served as assistant parish priest in the West Cork parish of Ballingeary in 1917. His 95-page, red-backed book of Mary O’Leary’s songs was originally published in 1931 by the Irish government printing office but it has been out of print since the 1950s. It was felicitously translated for me, in stages, by Hugh O’Donnell, Kieran J. Desmond, Michael Desmond, and Larry McCurry. Having used their translations to complete the first part of this manuscript, I was introduced to a further translation of Filíocht Mháire Bhuí Ní Laoghaire which proved to be a most valuable resource. It was privately published in 1996 by two priests, Fr. Richard P. Burke SJ of College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, and Father Seán Sweeney SMA of Dedham, Massachusetts. They produced it as a non-profit venture for circulation to about 150 people, and their labour of love immensely aided mine. All the mysteries of the little red-backed book were finally unlocked for me. I wrote to Fr. Burke in July 1999, to tell him how much I appreciated his work only to discover, sadly, that he had died two months earlier. I would like to believe he would have given his blessing to this work.
Other texts consulted include Family Names of County Cork by Diarmuid O’Murchadha (Glendale Press 1985, The Collins Press 1996), and Cork History & Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County, edited by Patrick O’Flanagan and Cornelius G. Buttimer (Geography Publications, 1993). Additional historical material was drawn from An Illustrated History of the Irish People by Kenneth Neill (Mayflower Books, 1979). West Cork genealogist Mary Casey provided anecdotal material. While others have provided the raw material for this manuscript, I take full responsibility for whatever interpretation or emphasis I may have placed on the facts supplied.
I would like to pay tribute to Helen Davis, the Special Collections Librarian at University College Cork, who was most helpful to me, as were several of her colleagues including Seán Ua Suilleabháin, who translated some reference material for me. An additional salute goes to the gas pump attendant in Inchigeelagh, County Cork, who pointed me in the direction of Mary O’Leary’s gravesite. Other valuable help in Inchigeelagh came from Seán O’Sullivan of the Ballingeary Historical Society who has worked hard to preserve the memory of Mary O’Leary. In 1998, members of the Ballingeary Society joined forces with the Bantry Historical Society to erect a monument in the Pass of Keimaneigh commemorating the 1822 battle that is the subject of Mary O’Leary’s best-known poem.
Special personal thanks goes to my daughter, Nicole Brennan, who returned from a year-long stay in Ireland with a wonderful gift: a rare hardback copy of Filíocht Mháire Bhuí Ní Laoghaire, the little red-covered book that inspired me to write this book. The love and support of my wife Zelda sustained me through the tougher parts of the research and the writing, when my failing memory of the Irish language, and my struggles to reconcile conflicting historical data, conspired to sink this project.
My greatest debt is to the dedicatee of this book, my first cousin and fellow Mary O’Leary descendant Kieran Desmond, who provided unfailing support and enthusiasm for this labour of love. He assisted me substantially at every stage of the work, and gave me many useful comments on the finished manuscript.
Brian Brennan, 2011
Author’s note
In Irish writings, the Gaelic version of the name O’Leary is variously spelt Ó Laoghaire or O’Laoire. I have chosen the newer Irish spelling, O’Laoire (or Ní Laoire in its feminine form), for the most part, while alternating that with the English version, O’Leary, whenever it serves to separate a person of one generation from a similarly-named member of another generation. The O’Leary clan, throughout the centuries, used such a limited range of first names that confusion inevitably arises. I have done the same for other Gaelic proper names throughout the manuscript, trying to maintain some consistency in the simplification and spelling of the names, particularly place names. But there may be some lapses. Maps and authors do not always agree. Neither do writers in Irish, who substitute the letter i for the letter a, or the letter e for the letter a, seemingly at will.
Note: This Smashwords edition, for formatting reasons, does not contain the original Irish versions of the poems, nor the sources, references, tables and explanatory footnotes included in the print version of the book. The full print version may be purchased by clicking here.
Introduction
Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire (literally, Yellow Mary O’Leary) was a true local heroine, a popular Munster folk poet of the nineteenth century whose creative contribution barely registers a blip on the radar screens of Irish literary scholarship.
While she does rate a one-paragraph mention in Robert Welch’s authoritative The Oxford Companion To Irish Literature (Clarendon, 1996), she does not appear at all in such English-language surveys of Irish literature as the magisterial An Duanaire, (Poetry Anthology) 1600-1900: Poems Of The Dispossessed by Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella (Dolmen Press, 1981).
One reason for this may be that Mary O’Leary came from an Irish literary tradition that remains virtually inaccessible to all but the Irish-speaking or Irish-reading minority of the Irish people.
Another likely reason for her obscurity is that Mary O’Leary composed her verses to be sung and never wrote them down. They were passed down orally from generation to generation. This puts her on the far side of the class divide separating the less privileged strata of Irish society – characterized by oral tradition, the Irish language and poverty – from the side representing literacy, English, and all the trappings of patriarchal and colonialist modernity.
The oral tradition, as the critic Angela Bourke has noted in her essay, “Performing not Writing: The Reception of an Irish Woman’s Lament,” needs no endorsement from the world of written literature to ensure its validity or survival.
But the world of writing persists in speaking of and for it, and it is in the spirit of what Ó Tuama and Kinsella might call “repossession” that I have written this book about the life and oral poetry of Mary O’Leary.
Oral poems are often presented in literary anthologies as the work of “Anonymous” who, as Virginia Woolf wryly remarked, was probably a woman. However, happily for Irish literary historians, Mary O’Leary was not one such anonymous female. Her works were eventually collected, written down, and preserved. They survive not only in the folklore of West Cork but also in the archives of such institutions as University College Cork and the Ballingeary Historical Society of West Cork. Additionally, they survive in the curricula of the Irish-speaking schools of Munster, and in such Irish-language anthologies as Filíocht na nGael (Poetry of the Irish) by Padraig Ó’Canainn (An Press Náisiúnta, 1958), though many of these collections are now out of print.
Born in 1774 near Inchigeelagh, Co. Cork, into the Buí (Yellow) branch of the O’Leary clan which once held the local lands under the patronage of the higher-ranking MacCarthy overlords, Mary O’Leary composed poetry of a kind that demands a listening rather than a reading audience. This poses a challenge for a modern outsider endeavouring to assess her artistic contribution. While a spirited and lyrically appropriate translation of her works might serve to give some sense of her literary achievement, there is no way of knowing what kind of artistry she might have brought to the oral performance. One encounters a similar problem when trying to evaluate the artistic merit of rock music lyrics existing in isolation from the music and the performance.
One can never fully appreciate, for example, the power of the laments that Mary O’Leary composed in response to local tragic events. Lamenting the dead was a central component of funeral ritual in Ireland until modern times. The woman who led the “keening” (lamenting) was both poet and performer. She assumed ownership of the community’s grief and expressed it in all its complexity with her words, appearance, behaviour and voice.
Mary O’Leary composed several laments. She also composed love songs, religious meditations and humorous pieces reflecting the life of her community. Sometimes, she ventured beyond the limits of the oral folk genre into the realm of higher literary tradition recalling the distant poetic masters of the 17th and eighteenth centuries. Her use of the aisling or vision-poem form, for example, hearkens back to a style favoured by Egan O’Rahilly (1670-1726) and Owen Roe O’Sullivan (1748-84). In her poem Ar Leacain na Gréine (“On a Sunny Hillside”) she encounters a fairy woman of outstanding beauty who foretells the defeat of the English despite the failure of the French general Lazare Hoche’s invasion of 1796.
Perhaps Mary O’Leary’s best-known poem is Cath Chéim an Fhia (“The Battle of Keimaneigh”) which gives a lively, if somewhat exaggerated account of an 1822 clash between a secret society of tenant farmers known as the Whiteboys or the Rockites, and the local battalion of yeomanry – a volunteer cavalry force raised from the landlord class by Lord Bantry. Mary O’Leary was a witness to some of the battle, which involved several members of her family and took place not far from her home.
The creators of poetry anthologies, and others who confer the approval of the English literary tradition on Irish oral poetry, have paid scant attention to the creative output of Mary O’Leary. This is a shame because Mary O’Leary emerges as one of the very few female Irish-language poets to achieve name recognition during the period from medieval times to the present. The only other female Gaelic poet to achieve similar recognition was Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chomhnaill (Dark-haired Eileen O’Connell) whose sole remembered contribution is the poem Caoine Airt Uí Laoghaire (“Lament for Art O’Leary”), an eighteenth century masterpiece in the lyric “keening” tradition.
Mary O’Leary left her mark during the nineteenth century when the government policies initiated in Tudor times for eliminating the Irish language finally began to bear fruit. By the end of the century, the English language was the common currency of the Irish people. During the last part of this long, three-century gap between the collapse of the old Gaelic tradition of artistic patronage for hereditary bardic poets, and the emergence of English as the dominant vernacular of the Irish people, Mary O’Leary stood tall as the standard-bearer for those communities who used verse instinctively as a vehicle for recording the events of everyday life.
Though they did not mention her specifically by name, I like to believe that Ó Tuama and Kinsella might have had Mary O’Leary in mind when they declared, in their introduction to An Duanaire, that Gaelic verse in the nineteenth century, though of minor artistic interest, had “more vitality on the whole, and more reference to life as lived, than the bulk of nineteenth century Irish verse written in English.”
CHAPTER 1: THE O’LEARY CLAN
“Cois abhainn Ghleanna an Chéama
in Uíbh Laoire ‘sea bhímse.”
“Near the river bank in Keimaneigh
in Iveleary I spend my time.”
So sang Mary O’Leary, the poet of her clan, in the opening lines of her most famous poem, composed to commemorate the Battle of Keimaneigh in 1822. Her choice of the ancient place name Uíbh Laoghaire (literally: descendants of Laoghaire) is significant. For Mary O’Leary, as for many of her clan, Uíbh Laoghaire (or in its English dress, Iveleary) meant the sprawling parish of Inchigeelagh, West Cork, a region that served for centuries as the habitat of the O’Learys, one of the most tightly knit and deeply rooted of the old Gaelic septs or clans.
The O’Learys settled in Inchigeelagh after they were expelled from their ancestral homeland circa 1192. They came initially from the rocky seacoast of southwest County Cork, the peninsular region southwest of Clonakilty between Rosscarbery and Glandore. Their forebears were members of an ancient Munster tribe known as Corca Laoí (the People of the River Lee).
The O’Learys were banished from the Rosscarbery area by two other Gaelic septs, named O’Donovan and O’Collins, who had themselves been driven by Anglo-Norman invaders from their lands in County Limerick. The O’Learys did not flee far, however. They migrated just a few miles northward to the remote mountain region of Inchigeelagh.
Here, in the lea of the overshadowing Kerry Mountains, the O’Learys ruled under the protection of the higher-ranking MacCarthys who, as Gaelic overlords of the barony of Muskerry, politically dominated the entire western half of County Cork. The Muskerry MacCarthys were, in turn, a branch of the MacCarthy Mór (Large) dynasty of Desmond, which ruled the southern half of the province of Munster (Deas + Mhumhan = south Munster) from the twelfth to the sixteenth century.
The O’Learys in Inchigeelagh remained virtually unaffected by the MacCarthy hegemony, especially after the MacCarthys gained control of Muskerry in the fourteenth century. With the MacCarthys thus preoccupied, the O’Learys maintained a high degree of independence, which lasted until the seventeenth century.
CELTIC TRADITION REMAINED STRONG
Though ranked as Cork’s third-largest civil and ecclesiastical parish, with its 118 townlands (45,415 statute acres), Inchigeelagh before the late sixteenth century qualified as little more than an insignificant lordship in an upland district. It was not considered worthy of mention, either in official English documents or in Irish annals or bardic poetry. This remoteness from extraneous influences contributed to the preservation of a unique system of land division, dating back to pre-Christian Celtic times.
Paternal ancestry dictated the way in which land passed from one generation of O’Learys to the next. The inheritance system was complicated, however, by the fact that first-born succession was not customary. Like the Celts, the O’Learys did not practise primogeniture. Their first-born received no preference in matters of inheritance or succession. An O’Leary clan chief could be succeeded by any of his male relatives who shared the same great-grandfather. This rather large group would include his brothers, nephews, first and second cousins, as well as members of his immediate family. A review of the O’Leary genealogy shows many instances where property passed from grandfather to grandson, from uncle to nephew, cousin to cousin, and so on. This system prevailed until the early seventeenth century, when the old Celtic laws, under which the Irish had lived for more than a thousand years, were finally repealed.
The O’Learys were land-holding cattlemen, occupying townlands given to them by their MacCarthy overlords, one of whom lived nearby. This arrangement, too, derived from Celtic tradition. The only Irish settlements faintly resembling towns in Celtic Ireland were the clustered dwellings of peasant kinsmen gathered around the larger homes of local kings or important nobles. It was these clusters or “towns” that gave the Irish “townland” – a small territorial subdivision averaging about half a square mile in area – its English name.
The O’Learys were the spiritual descendants of a land-holding farming class that was the foundation of Celtic society. The yeoman farmer of this period was known as a bóaire, literally a cattleman. Wealth was measured in cattle, not in land. A nobleman rented out his cattle with the understanding that the bóaire – in addition to repaying the lord in milk and calves – would also provide certain personal and military services. Living off leases of great herds of cattle, the Celtic nobility was thus an idle class that could afford to devote its energies to warfare, the time-honoured sport of aristocrats. Combat invariably revolved around cattle raids, as groups of noblemen tried to increase their supply of this most valuable resource.
Over time, land gradually replaced cattle as the basic economic unit of agricultural value. Because the ability of a bóaire to build up his herd depended on appropriating sufficient grazing lands, an agriculture system based solely upon the leasing of cattle eventually made no sense. By the eighth century, Celtic nobles found it more useful to make tenancy arrangements with their clients rather than rent them cattle. Wars between neighbouring chieftains thus evolved from cattle raids into territorial clashes.
THE NORMANS MOVE WESTWARD
According to one published report, the O’Learys occupied townlands between Rosscarbery and Glandore in Southwest County Cork until after the Anglo-Norman conquest began in 1169.
Some twenty years earlier, the English-born Pope Hadrian IV had granted Henry II, the Norman king of England, the title “Lord of Ireland,” hoping this might encourage the king to help reorganize the Irish church. In the process, the Pope established a quasi-legal basis for English conquest and occupation of Ireland. The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland did not, however, destroy the sovereignty of the old Gaelic kingdoms. It merely imposed the authority of the English king on a few Irish coastal towns and their immediate territories.
The original Norman invaders of England – sophisticated European warriors of Viking ancestry, with special talents for warfare and efficient government – had been given free settlement of Wales and were spoiling for Ireland. Their opportunity came when Diarmuid MacMurrough, the deposed ruler of Leinster – one of five large kingdoms in Celtic Ireland – turned to King Henry II for help. Henry granted permission for an army to be raised from the Welsh Normans. With them as allies, Diarmuid quickly regained his Leinster kingdom. He might also have gained the high kingship of the entire country, but his death prevented it. He died suddenly in 1177, two years after the Norman soldiers arrived. The Welsh-Norman warrior knight Richard de Clare, earl of Pembroke – better known by his evocative nickname, Strongbow – succeeded Diarmuid. This was because Diarmuid had made Strongbow a most tempting offer to guarantee his support: the hand of his daughter in marriage, and with it the opportunity to inherit the kingship of Leinster.
The Gaelic chieftains, who had long engaged in unsophisticated tribal warfare, were no match for these well-equipped Norman warriors. They capitulated in short order. By the year 1200, a handful of Norman lords controlled three-quarters of Ireland. It was only a token victory, however. King Henry II had entered into treaty obligations with the Irish kings, acknowledging the validity of their royal houses.
Thus, the Norman Conquest of Ireland, as historian Magnus Magnusson says, was only half a conquest. While Norman barons controlled much of the country, and developed new patterns of trade, they never succeed in doing what they had done in England, i.e. creating a new nation combining the characteristics of natives and invaders alike.
THE O’LEARYS SETTLE IN INCHIGEELAGH
The O’Learys migrated northward from their ancestral homelands in southwest County Cork, eventually settling under the patronage of the MacCarthys – who retained their feudal territories in the face of the Norman invasion – in the area adjoining the River Lee, between Inchigeelagh and Gougane Barra. This remote mountain district, roughly bounded by Toon Bridge, Keimaneigh, the Shehy Mountains and Toon River, became known as the O’Leary territory, then Iveleary now Inchigeelagh.
Despite its remoteness, Iveleary was far from being a no-man’s land before the O’Learys arrived. The abundance of such Celtic archeological sites as wedge-tombs, standing stones, ring-forts (homestead sites), stone and wooden dwellings attests to a continuity of occupation for many centuries before the coming of the Normans. As part of the kingdom of Desmond, Iveleary may also have provided secure refuge for MacCarthy leaders pursued by Anglo-Norman antagonists.
When the MacCarthys asserted their dominance in the barony of Muskerry during the fourteenth century, they granted thirty of their townlands to the O’Leary clan. The O’Learys initially occupied the Inchigeelagh territory as freeholders, and eventually paid a nominal rent of twenty-four cattle plus £7 2s. 3d annually.
As part of the rental deal, the O’Learys were obliged to give the MacCarthy tánaiste (crown prince) two days and nights of free room and board, once every quarter. Additionally, the tánaiste, who lived in a castle at Carrignamuck, south of Ballingeary, qualified for a payment of £4 9s. every time a new O’Leary chief was elected. A further condition was that the O’Learys would assist the MacCarthys whenever they engaged in territorial wars with their neighbours. The fortunes of the O’Learys were thus inextricably linked to how well the MacCarthys fared in battle. Marriages between O’Learys and MacCarthys also served to link the two clans.
THREE CASTLES BUILT
During the 1500s, the O’Learys constructed three stone tower-houses or small castles as fortifications in the region. They built the main one near Carrignaneelagh (Rock of the Captives), three miles east of the present township of Inchigeelagh. This edifice no longer exists. On the Ordnance Survey of Ireland map (Discovery Series 86), its site is marked near Kilbarry Hill. It was built around 1565 and occupied by clan chief Art O’Laoire during Elizabethan times – when the first records of the O’Learys began to appear in such documents as the O’Clery Book of Genealogies and Eothan Ó Caoimh’s An Leabhar Mhuimhneach (The Book of Munster). Art’s genealogy can be traced back through about twenty-five generations to the original Laoghaire whose name, in Irish, means “keeper of calves.”
Art’s grandfather Diarmuid (Dermot or Jeremiah) O’Laoire, who lived in the early sixteenth century, is the first to be named in the O’Leary genealogies as duly elected lord or chief of the clan. The election would have taken place, according to Gaelic-Celtic tradition, with votes cast by men whose fathers, grandfathers, or great-grandfathers had been chiefs.
Art’s father Conchobhar (Cornelius or Conor), who died about 1576, is the first chief about whom detailed information is available. A 1626 government survey found that he had held extensive townlands north of the River Lee, including such properties as Glasheen, Cloonshear Beg, Milleen, and Derryvane.
Both Art and his father were involved, albeit indirectly, with the first Desmond rebellion of the 1570s, when the hereditary Old English (Anglo-Norman) earl of southern Munster, Gerald FitzThomas, tried unsuccessfully to “defend our Catholic faith against Englishmen which have overrun our country.”
Art and his father Conchobhar (identified in official English documents as “Cnogher M’Dermode O Leary of Inshygyelaghe”) were pardoned in 1573 for their role in the Desmond rebellion. Subsequent pardons were issued to Art in 1584, 1585, and 1587, although these pardons seem to have been more in the nature of indemnities than actual absolution for rebellious deeds allegedly perpetrated by Art. As chief representative of the clan, Art would not – openly at any rate – have supported the Earl of Desmond’s rebellion.
Art’s son Dónal (Donald) became the O’Leary clan chief after the death of his uncle Donnchadh (Denis) in 1638. He was listed as occupant of the Carrignaneelagh tower house in the 1641 civil survey of the barony of Muskerry.
In 1650, Cromwellian troops occupied the tower house. They garrisoned the district and occupied the castle until shortly before the restoration of the Stuart monarchy with Charles II in 1660. They left the tower in poor shape.
During the eighteenth century, the Barry family acquired the neighbouring townland. They lived in a house adjoining the castle. James Barry (1761-1835), dubbed “Big Barry” by Mary O’Leary, earned a notorious reputation as one of the most grasping landlords in the district. In 1822, the year of the Keimaneigh battle in which Barry fought on the side of the English, his house was burned to the ground by members of the Whiteboy secret society of Catholic peasant farmers. The Whiteboys were known locally as the Rockites, after their outlaw leader, the mysterious Capt. Rock. Barry ordered his tenants to rebuild the house, using stone from Carrignaneelagh castle. The rebuilt farmhouse still stands, now divided into two separate dwellings, but there is no trace of the castle.
As for Barry, the story goes (according to Mary O’Leary’s biographer, Fr. Donncha Ó Donnchú) that he was buried in 1835 in the old graveyard in Inchigeelagh on the same day that a female member of the O’Leary clan was buried there. After her graveside rituals were concluded, the O’Leary mourners gathered around Barry’s tomb. One of them stomped on his flagstone and said, “Yes, there you are now as weak and feeble as the old woman we ourselves have brought. A bold man you were at the Battle of Keimaneigh, and now make the devil take your soul off with him.”
Before his death, about 1830, Barry built a road through the Pass of Keimaneigh at the point where the government militia had difficulties moving in their troops during the 1822 battle. In 1998, the Bantry and Ballingeary historical societies installed a monument at this location to commemorate those killed in the battle.
CASTLE AT CARRIGNACURRA
An earlier O’Leary castle was built, between 1450 and 1500, on a rock near the banks of the Lee, at a place called Carrignacurra (Rock of the Weir), about one mile southeast of the present township of Inchigeelagh. The letters “A.L.” found on a wall of that castle would suggest that the builder was a clan member named Art O’Laoire. It stood five floors tall, with the top two floors serving as the family’s private rooms. The ruins of this castle still stand. The founder of this branch of the clan was Diarmuid Óg (Dermot the Younger) O’Laoire, uncle of Carrignaneelagh chief Art O’Laoire, whose involvement in the Earl of Desmond’s rebellions was somewhat more conspicuous than that of his nephew, Art. An inquisition held in Shandon Castle, Cork, on 9 September 1588 ruled that Diarmuid Óg had been active in the Desmond revolts.
Diarmuid Óg, who lived at Carrignacurra from 1565 onward, named his first-born son Tadhg Meirgeach (Timothy the rusty, or the crusty one), and this dynastic clan-name – O’Laoire Meirgeach – passed to several of Tadhg’s descendants. In 1584, a listing of the occupants at Carrignacurra included Diarmuid Óg and his wife Eileen, sons Tadhg and Donal, and daughter Ellen, along with thirteen soldiers – eighteen people in all.
Other dynastic clan-names associated with Inchigeelagh parish at that time include O’Laoire Art, O’Laoire Bolgaighe (of the smallpox), O’Laoire Breac (speckled), O’Laoire Cart (probably from Mac Art: son of Art), O’Laoire Bhuí (the yellow or the sallow), O’Laoire Céadach (possessing one hundred, likely cattle), O’Laoire Ceithearnach (kern-like), O’Laoire na Cipe (of the stock or block), O’Laoire Clogach (the blistered one), O’Laoire Dana (bold), O’Laoire Dorcha (dark one), O’Laoire Mocheirghe (of the early rising), O’Laoire Rua (red-haired), O’Laoire Glas (grey or pallid), O’Laoire Riabhach (brindled), O’Laoire Runtach (secretive).
The O’Laoire Bhuí branch, from which Mary O’Leary is descended, did not qualify for occupancy of any O’Leary castles. From the 1640s onward, the Clan Bhuí (sometimes anglicized as Boy) were associated primarily with the western townlands on either side of the Pass of Keimaneigh: Inchideraille, Derreenglass and Tooreennanean (Little Lea of the Birds), where Mary O’Leary was born in 1774. But, as can be seen from the names appearing in the various O’Leary wills of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, they did seem to develop some links with the O’Laoire Meirgeach line of Carrignacurra. In a closely-knit community like Iveleary, even those consigned to the outer limits of the clan power-sharing structure were still allowed a direct connection to the centre.
CASTLE AT DROMCARRA
A third O’Leary castle was built near Dromcarra, east of Carrignaneelagh, about six miles southwest of Macroom. It was badly damaged in 1650 during the Cromwellian campaign, but the ruins remained upright until 1968, when the local authorities condemned the structure as unsafe.
The first known owner was Donnchadh (Denis) O’Laoire, the younger brother of Art Mac Conchobhar O’Laoire of Carrignaneelagh who became clan chief in 1572.
Art served as chief for twenty years before passing the title to his brother Auliffe Ruadh (Humphrey the red-haired). Auliffe was killed in 1601 at the battle of Ahakeera, a tribal clash over cattle involving about one hundred O’Laoire clan members and members of the neighbouring O’Crowley clan of Dunmanway. The O’Laoire title then passed to Art’s younger brother Donnchadh (Denis).
Donnchadh, known as an Ghaorthaí (the Geary), found himself competing for the Carrignaneelagh castle with Art’s son Dónal (Donald), and eventually decided to build his own tower house at Dromcarra. A modest structure by castle standards, measuring 30 ft long by 20 ft wide with a height of 40 ft, Dromcarra was completed in 1625 at a cost of £110. Donnchadh lived there until his death in 1638. The castle then became the property of his son and heir Auliffe.
This castle was virtually destroyed during Lord Broghill’s campaign in 1650, but managed to remain upright until 1968 when the Irish army demolished it in an explosives exercise.
GAELIC REVIVAL
The three O’Leary castles were all built before 1541, when the English Crown moved to suppress any ideas of religious or political independence in Ireland. At the same time, the Crown tried to recapture some of the ground it lost during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when English political and cultural influence declined throughout the country.
Ireland had witnessed something of a Gaelic revival from the mid-1300s onward as the Crown became preoccupied, first with the Hundred Years’War against France (1337-1453), then with the subsequent thirty years of civil war during the Wars of the Roses (1457-87) when the English crown changed hands six times. These distractions created an opportunity for some of the more powerful Gaelic chieftains and Anglo-Norman lords to turn Ireland into a semi-autonomous feudal outpost.
In 1541, King Henry VIII moved to restore English dominance in Ireland. He assumed the title “king of Ireland,” and called on all Irish rulers to swear allegiance to him. In the process, he effectively abolished the old Irish kingdoms. The Irish kings pledged allegiance without realizing that such a gesture meant signing away their lands to the Crown. Previously, pledging allegiance to the monarch had meant little more than ritual and pageantry. As soon as the English armies sailed back across the Irish Sea, the native rulers regained control of their territories. In this instance, however, swearing allegiance to the Crown marked the first step in the Tudor conquest of Ireland.
THE PLANTATION OF MUNSTER
It was left to Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, who ascended to the throne in 1558, to carry through what her father had started. During the 1570s and 1580s, Elizabethan armies firmly established English rule in the southern Irish province of Munster and the western province of Connacht. Attempts to replace native landowners with English settlers, however, proved largely unsuccessful. The so-called Plantation of Munster failed because the estates were unwieldy and difficult to manage. Most of the Munster planters, including Sir Walter Raleigh and the poet Edmund Spenser, abandoned their holdings during the turmoil of the 1590s when a major rebellion in the northern province of Ulster by Hugh O’Neill, the earl of Tyrone, placed an almost intolerable strain on England’s stretched resources.
It was during this period that the MacCarthy and O’Leary clans were able to regain some of their confiscated lands. They were pardoned for having taken up arms whenever they felt English expansion threatened their interests. They were also granted permission to hold land as long as they had no charges of murder or treason against them. One further condition of a 1573 pardon granted to Conchobhar O’Laoire, father of Carrignaneelagh branch founder Art O’Laoire, was that he surrender 131 cows to the English army stationed in Munster. In a country where wealth still tended to be measured in terms of cattle rather than land, this was a significant concession.
When the Scottish king James I, a Protestant, ascended to the English throne in 1603, many of the Catholic Irish leaders, including those of the MacCarthy and O’Leary clans, pledged allegiance to him. In return, they were allowed to take back more of their ancestral lands and – in the case of the MacCarthys – the titles that originally went with them. Donogh Mac Cormaic Óg MacCarthy, for example, was named both Baron of Blarney (1578) and Viscount of Muskerry (1628). Occupancy of the lands hardly constituted clear ownership, however. MacCarthy’s rent rose from £16 to £100 annually.
CROMWELLIAN CAMPAIGN BEGINS
Many of the MacCarthy and O’Leary land holdings were forfeited during the 1650s, when English officials took advantage of every legal pretext to dispossess Irish Catholic landowners. The situation became most critical when Oliver Cromwell, named Lord Protector after the execution of King Charles I, gave the Catholic landowners of Munster, Leinster and western Ulster the option of going “to hell or to Connacht.” By this he meant that, under penalty of death no Irish could live east of the River Shannon, and only those who could prove they had not been rebels could own land west of the Shannon. Donogh MacCarthy, the Gaelic lord of Muskerry, surrendered his estates and fled into exile.
In 1641, eight years before Cromwell landed in Dublin, Catholics owned more than 60 percent of the profitable land in Ireland. In the Inchigeelagh area, the clan of O’Laoire Bhuí held eight townlands. By 1659, the figure for Catholic land ownership had dropped to about 8 percent, with most of the owners living in Connacht. A series of penal laws were subsequently enacted, prohibiting Catholics from owning land at all.
The 1654 Civil Survey of the barony of Muskerry depicts Iveleary as utterly devastated by the Cromwellian campaign. The tower-houses in Carrignacurra and Dromcarra were badly damaged, and English soldiers garrisoned the castle at Carrignaneelagh. A massive disruption of the old order had ensued.
With the restoration of the Stuart monarchy with Charles II in 1660, many of the dispossessed Gaelic lords were allowed to take back at least a portion of their estates. Donogh MacCarthy returned to Ireland and was named Earl of Clancarthy in 1660 – five years before his death – because of his ancestral claim to the Gaelic overlordship of all Muskerry. After his death in 1665, his wife Eileen assumed possession of his estates.
The O’Learys, having lost their previous status as semi-independent landowners, became tenants of Clancarthy – an arrangement that failed to suit many of them. Some moved to County Clare, others spread their wings with the Wild Geese – the name traditionally given to the Irish who have migrated to other countries – and others became outlaws in the mountains. The main Carrignaneelagh branch eventually moved to Drishane and Millstreet.
Some members of the O’Leary clan did, nevertheless, manage to retain some hold on their Iveleary homeland. One who successfully claimed restoration of his lands in 1699, for example, was Capt. Céadach (Keadagh) O’Leary of Teergay, a clansman of the O’Laoire Meirgeach family of Carrignacurra. Keadagh’s military title derived from his service as an officer in the army of King James II during the Williamite wars. He served in an infantry regiment led by Sir John Fitzgerald
The coronation of the Catholic King James II, in 1685, gave a much-needed boost to the hopes of Irish Catholics who had lost much of their profitable lands during the Cromwellian campaign of the 1650s. The English parliament, however, would not accept a return to Catholicism. The Dutch prince, William of Orange, replaced James in a bloodless coup.
James decided he could still rely on Irish Catholics if he attempted to regain his throne. In 1689, he landed in Cork and raised an army of 25,000 from the ranks of Irish Catholics. In 1690, James lost to the Williamite forces at the famous Battle of the Boyne, after which he fled to France. Irish Catholic resistance continued for more than a year. During this time, the MacCarthy and O’Leary clans lost possessions and status.