Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig

Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig (c. 1580 - c. 1652) was a scholar and poet of noble descent from Ossory. Only a handful of his poems are still extant. A cry of despair against the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, and its consequences for the world and class which he belonged to, his Faisean Chláir Éibhir bears a striking resemblance to the poetry of the great Dáibhí Ó Bruadair: "A trick of this false world has laid me low: servants in every home with grimy English but no regard for one of the poet class save "Out! and take your precious Gaelic with you!"[1]

Mac Giolla Phádraig was ordained a priest in 1610. Around the year 1651 he was appointed vicar general and apostolic vicar of the diocese of Ossory. He was executed by Oliver Cromwell's forces shortly afterwards.[2] A memorial to him lies in the village square of Durrow.

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  1. ^ See another translation in Joep Leerssen’s Mere Irish and Fior-Gael (Cork UP, 1996)
  2. ^ Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella, An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed, p. 89.

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