Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Conmara

He was born into the Irish clan Mac Conmara at Cratloe, County Clare.

According to the oral tradition, Donnchadh Ruadh left Ireland and studied abroad to enter the priesthood of the still illegal and underground Catholic Church in Ireland, but was expelled from the major seminary and spent years wandering in Catholic Europe. Following his return to Ireland, the poet settled in the Sliabh gCua district between the Comeraghs and Knockmealdown Mountains of County Waterford, where he remains a well-known anti-hero in local Irish folklore.[1]

Around 1741, he was appointed assistant master of the illegal Catholic hedge school at Seskinane, near Touraneena, County Waterford.[2] He is said locally to have been a highly talented hurler and to have once led his students to victory upon the pitch against a rival hurling team from a neighbouring district.[3]

He is said to have sailed for Newfoundland around 1743. Donnchadh Ruadh was a notorious rake and allegedly fled to Newfoundland to escape the wrath of a local man whose daughter the poet had impregnated.[4]

After returning to Ireland, Donnchadh Ruadh converted to Protestantism and joined the Church of Ireland parish in Rossmire, Newtown near Kilmacthomas. He was briefly appointed as parish clerk but when the Vicar and parishioners discovered how great a rogue he was, Donnchadh Ruadh was dismissed and converted back to the Catholicism.[5]

In 1810, at the age of 95, Donnchadh Ruadh died in Newtown and lies buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery there.[6]

While still teaching at Synge Street CBS in Dublin, Francis MacManus wrote and published a trilogy of biographical novels set in Penal times and about the life of Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Conmara. They comprise the novels Stand and Give Challenge (1934), Candle for the Proud (1936) and Men Withering (1939).[7]

For a long time, it was doubted whether Donnchadh Ruadh ever even visited Newfoundland. During the 21st century, however, linguists discovered that multiple Donnchadh Ruadh poems in the Irish language contain Gaelicized renderings of words and terms that are unique to Newfoundland English. For this reason, Donnchadh Ruadh's poems are considered the earliest solid evidence of the speaking of the Irish language in Newfoundland.[8]

• Clan MacNamara
• Diarmuid mac Sheáin Bhuí Mac Cárthaigh
• Dónall na Buile Mac Cárthaigh, fl. 1730s-40s.
• Eoghan an Mhéirín Mac Cárthaigh, 1691–1756.
• History of hurling
• Irish language in Newfoundland
• Irish language outside Ireland
• Irish Newfoundlanders

• Séamus J. King (1996, 1998), A History of Hurling: Revised and Updated, Gill & Macmillan.
• Éamonn Ó Ciardha (2001, 2004), Ireland And The Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766: A Fatal Attachment, p. 224, 306, 315, Four Courts Press.
• Edited by Natasha Sumner and Aidan Doyle (2020), North American Gaels: Speech, Song, and Story in the Diaspora, McGill-Queen's University Press.