Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig

Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig (c. 1580 – c. 1652), Irish poet and priest.

Background

Mac Giolla Phádraig was a member of the dynasty that ruled Ossory since at least the 9th century. 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.

Faisean Chláir Éibhir

The full title comes from its first line: Och mo chreachsa faisean chláir Éibhir. Mac Giolla Phádraig's most famous work deplored the anglicisation of ordinary poor Irish farm labourers, pejoratively known as churls, in the 1600s. He considered that formerly they were poorer and more respectful of his Church and Gaelic culture, but were now starting to adopt materialism and the English language. Extracts give a flavour:

‘… each beggarwoman’s son has curled locks, bright cuffs about his paw, and a golden ring like a prince of the blood of Cas.. each churl or his son is starched up around the chin, a scarf thrown around him and a garter on him, his tobacco-pipe in his gob.. his knuckles bedecked with bracelets.. a churl in each house that is owned by a speaker of horrible English and no-one paying any heed to a man of the poetic company, save for “Get out, and take your precious Gaelic with you”.'

Notes

  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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