• Irish Eclogues (Dublin & London: Maunsel & Co. 1915), 64pp. [see details].
• Poems (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis; London: George Roberts 1928).

• The Gael (Dublin & London: Maunsel 1919), 337pp. [see extracts]
• as Éamonn Mac Giolla Iasachta, Cúrsaí Thomáis: Shois Seal a’s Shuas Seal (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis 1927), Do. [rep. edn.] (BAC: An Clochomhar Tta. 1969), 254pp., and Do., trans. by E. O’Clery as The Small Fields of Carrig (London: Heath Cranton 1929), 286pp.

• An Aifric Theas (BAC: Oifig an tSolathair 1947), 147pp.

• Horace Plunkett and His Place in the Irish Nation (Dublin: Maunsel 1916).
• Calendar of the Orrery Papers (Irish Manscript Commission 1941), xi, 396pp.
• The Kenmare Manuscripts (1942).
• The Wardenship of Galway (1944).
• East Clare 1916-1921 (1954).
• Seventeenth Century Hearth Money Rolls (1967).
• Irish Life in the Seventeenth Century: After Cromwell (Cork: Cork UP 1939), 463pp.; Do. [rev. edn.] (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1950), and Do. (Cork: Mercier 1969; rep. 1979), 480pp., ill. [12 pls.].
• Irish Families: Their Names, Arms and Origins (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1957, rev. 1972).
• More Irish Families (Galway & Dublin: O’Gorman 1960).
• Supplement to Irish Families (Dublin: Helicon 1964).
• A Guide to Irish Surnames (Dublin: Helicon 1964).
• Surnames of Ireland (Shannon: Irish UP [1969]).
• Bibliography of Irish Family History (Irish Academic Press 1981), 60pp.
• More Irish Families: Incorporating Supplement to Irish Families, with an Essay on Irish Chieftainries [rev. edn.] (Dublin: Irish Academic [1982]).

• Forth the Banners Go: Reminiscences of William O’Brien, as told to Edward MacLysaght (Dublin: Three Candles 1969), 314pp.
• Changing Times: Ireland Since 1898, as seen by Edward MacLysaght (Gerrards Cross; Colin Smythe 1978), 248pp., ill. [4] lv pls.

• Charles Lysaght, A Memoir of Edward MacLysaght, 1887-1986: a paper read to the National Library of Ireland Society [at the Genealogical Office, Dublin on Friday, 6 November 1987], foreword Patrick Henchy.
• Seán Ó Ceallaigh, Éamonn Mac Giolla Iasachta, 1887-1986: Beathaisnéis, ed. Liam Prút (Baile Átha Cliath: Coiscéim 2003), 475pp.

See also the list of his publ. works compiled by Etienne Rynne published by Cumann Leabharlann Naisiunta na hÉireann (Dublin [1988]), 28pp.

 Like most men, Con O’Hickie was unable to throw off the fascination of thinking in bed when anything unusually interesting was in his mind. Having from time to time tried the expedients of counting sheep as they jumped a low wall, brushing his hair and teeth, and repeating mechanically as much as he could remember of some poem he learned at school, he eventually abandoned the attempt, and turned on to his back with the avowed intention of thinking the matter to a conclusion: not till then could he sleep.
   To understand the problem which exercised the mind of Con O’Hickie, as he lay on his back in bed in one of the top rooms of a Fitzwilliam Square house, it is necessary to know something of Con O’Hickie himself.
   Con was at that time twenty-two. His father had died six years before, in 1899. Except for visits to his uncle in Dublin, a fashionable surgeon in whose house he now was, the first sixteen years of his life had been spent in England, but in an atmosphere of the most perfervid Fenianism which enforced exile had fostered in his father. Mr. O’Hickie had inherited, and hoped to bequeath to his son Con, a longing to regain a property in the southern part of County Galway from which his family had been expatriated in the past, together with a hatred of England as strong as it was unreasoning. This passion of his was, however, [2] entirely ineffective, since it gave him no greater satisfaction than voting for a timid Gladstonian in the two Home Rule elections; though it had one very positive effect, for his wife, once an amiable and mildly patriotic Kerry girl, had become so weary of his insistence at all seasons upon matters Irish, to the exclusion of every other subject of interest to dwellers in England, that less than a year after Mr. O’Hickie’s death, she married a Tory pressman of very definitely anti- Irish proclivities.
   Con at sixteen had been at once fired and amused by his father’s vigorous views. His school life at Stoneyhurst had brought him in touch with Irish boys who were not Fenians, and had given him a rest from his father’s intransigeance. At eighteen he entered Trinity and there experienced three pleasant years of University life, though academically his career was quite colourless. His first problem had confronted him then: his future. £7,000, which brought him £300 a year, did not seem to justify him in leading a lazy life. Canada had been his choice, faute de mieux: the possession of some capital and a great love of an open-air existence had decided him. Preparatory to making the somewhat violent wrench involved in actually crossing the Atlantic he had decided to go for a year to a gentleman farmer in County Waterford who advertised himself as a teacher of farming. This decision, while comfortably putting off the fatal day of making the plunge, also gave him a gratifying sense of mastership over his own destiny, of manhood, in fact.
 [... 3]
   His uncle had mentioned at dinner that Rathcarrig was in the market, and it had flashed upon him that there was at least a possibility, if he cared to take it, of realizing his father’s dream.
   Until that evening Rathcarrig had been no more than a name to Con, for his father’s rhapsodies used to go in at one ear and out at the other, and since his death Con had forgotten even the few facts about it which had at one time been in his mind. So it was [4] with mild interest that he had asked his uncle to tell him something about the place. [...]

 That Con would buy Rathcarrig was inevitable. Over-caution is not a characteristic highly developed in young men of Con’s type, and he was not of the kind to turn aside from an adventure. The project had taken hold of his imagination, and the future, at least while it was still remote, seemed to be invested with almost romantic possibilities.
 He had, however, in no way lost his head; he had inspected the lands with care, and his training with the Waterford farmer gave him a superficial knowledge which he felt to be the nucleus of an expert opinion. He could not deny to himself that the farm was in a very bad state, but the latent possibilities of fields impoverished by rabbits, and the very low purchase money and annuity gave him heart for an undertaking which, even with his impulsive confidence in himself as a farmer, he admitted to be a heavy one, and which the old man who had wonderingly accompanied him from field to field frankly told him was madness. [9]

Con meets and marries Mary Lalor, a Co-Operative Movement and a convert to the ”doctrines of rural regeneration taught taught by AE [George Russell]” (p.84). His attraction to Peggy lingers, however - and she remains the standard-bearer for anti-West British ideas in the novel as well as a frank hatred of all things English.

The things of which Mary Lalor had spoken familiarly were new to Con, and their assimilation in their fuller meaning was a slow process; the glamour of purely individual effort and the pride of personal ownership, which affected him strongly when working on his own lines at Rathcarrig, turned his mind for weeks together from the ideas which Mary first instilled into him on that walk home from Glenowen bog. But he both joined the Kilteely Co-operative Society and bought and read the books which Mary had recommended.
 He did not meet her again for some time, but he had already seen enough of her to be considerably impressed. He had, of course, come across clever young women at Trinity, but he thought that this was the first time he had met one with ideas.
 He admired her immensely, as who could not; for she was a pleasant girl to look upon, tall, slender, active and lissom as a boy in her movements, and possessed of a clear, mountain-given complexion, which made her features of little moment to the beholder, pretty though they undoubtedly were. Nevertheless, prone as Con was to headlong loves, Mary’s charm of manner and grace of figure did not spontaneously touch the incomprehensible spring in his heart. The cause of this was undoubtedly Peggy Folane. She was the first to lift the wand of enchantment [90 ...]
 “Anyone but a fool would be in love with Miss Lalor,” he said to himself, half laughing. “But I declare to God Peggy’s the sweetest thing in creation.” (p.90.)

 “ We'll never be able to get rid of England, I'm afraid,” Mary objected, “so we might as well make the best of her.”
 “Oh, I daresay we may never get rid of England as a political master — although empires never last for ever. But we can get rid of England’s influence over us without overthrowing her political power, much as I’d like to see that crumble, too.”
 “You mean that an Irish-speaking Ireland means a free Ireland, because it means an intellectually free Ireland,” said Con.
 “Exactly,” said Peggy, “but indeed Miss Lalor must think I'm a fanatic, I believe I never talked so much in all my life before.”
 “I confess you've almost made me wonder was I right to give up learning Irish,” said Mary.
 “Why not start a Gaelic League Branch in Kilteely,” said Con suddenly.
 “I'm afraid I couldn’t help much,” said Peggy, “I'm very much tied down here.”
 “Would you help ? “Con asked Mary. “I know
 [110]  you're a great organizer from all I hear about you on the committee of the co-operative society.”
 “Oh ! nonsense,” said Mary, “a thing like that only wants a little work to keep it together; once it’s started it practically runs itself. Everybody’s with 'us now. I'm no organizer.”
 “Well, you must become one,” said Con, “we'll make plans on the way back.”
 “I must go for the children,” said Peggy.
 They went out. On the stairs Con succeeded in exchanging a few hasty, whispered words with her.
 “You were in grand form this evening,” he said, “I never admired you so much. But I wish I could get you to myself a bit now and then. I saw as much of you at Keownstown, almost, as I do here.”
 “That’s not my fault,” she replied wistfully. “Walk back with me after Mass on Sunday, part of the way, then, and we'll chance what people will say. If we meet out at the cross and go over the fields we'll hardly meet a soul.”
 “Indeed I will,” said Con[.] (p.110.) 

 Con stands as an independent candidate in the 1910 General Election opposing Peter Paul Vahey of the Redmondite Irish Party and campaigns for independence from British political dominance and an opponent to the corrupt methods and pro-taxation stand of the Irish Party.

“In my election address, as at every meeting I spoke at.” said Con, “I repeated these half-dozen words: ' Ireland a Nation or West Britain a province.' If you have heard Mary enlarging on this to Mr. Willoughby, no doubt you understand that we put253] nationality before prosperity, or at least as an antecedent to it. Mary is much better than I am at expressing a point of view. You should get her to explain the outlook of Irish-Ireland, as we call it.” [...]
 It was Mary who replied to him [neighbouring landlord Fitzgerald]: “We are offered citizenship of the British Empire, as if that was the the highest thing the world had to offer. It doesn’t appeal to us. Perhaps we have perverted minds, or perhaps it is only another proof of the great gulf which is fixed between British civilization or culture and Irish — what is left of it. We might have no objection (Mrs. O’Hickie and I, for instance, differ on this point) to citizenship in the British Empire if it did not mean the inevitable decay of our Irish nationality and our eventual incorporation in a sort of composite British nation. Rightly or wrongly, we are inordinately proud of being a distinct nation. This is a much more important matter than people like you realize, Mr. Fitzgerald: for I don’t believe it ever occurs to you to think of it.” [254]
 “I'm sure I'm as proud as anyone of being Irish,” said he.
 “You are, I know,” replied Mary, “in a way, in some ways, you are more Irish than any of us, with your love of Irish music and poetry, and all that. But at the same time I venture to guess that you have not thought out the thing to its logical conclusion. You are proud of being Irish, but there is something in that pride like the pride of an English public school boy in his school. It would never occur to you, for instance, in Japan let us say, to insist that you were Irish, not British, would it ? ”
 “I really don’t know, perhaps not; what good would it be in any case?” asked Mr. Fitzgerald.
 “I think, as a matter of fact, that it would be some actual good, for you would have done your share in combating the idea which English people so calmly put about the world, namely, that the British Isles are both of them British and are willing partners in the joint Kingdom. It is most irritating the way people assume that Ireland is not a nation: that is our real reason for insisting so much on our nationality. If we don’t the day may come when we will take ourselves at other people’s valuation.”
 “Never,” exclaimed Peggy, “there will always be a gallant band in Ireland to keep the light burning, however low the nation may fall as a whole. But, all the same, you are right: we must insist on our nationality. Only so can we put the people at home in a fighting spirit. We can insist on our rights if we are keen enough about them. A really determined nation would be irresistible against any odds. It’s just because we are weak and half-hearted that it matters what other people think. No one questions the nationality of Spain, for instance, or even of the [255] Poles. But they have their language. Our only chance lies in ours, I believe.”
 “Of course,” Con remarked, “I agree with what Peggy has just said. But let Mary go on putting her case.”
 “I'm sorry,” said Peggy, subsiding with a grimace.
 Mary picked up her thread again: “Irish nationality exists and is real because we in Ireland believe in it. If the bulk of a people living within clearly defined geographical boundaries passionately believe that they are a separate and distinct nation surely they are one; more especially if they have behind them both tradition and history which can shew that they have not been part of any other nation, and if they possess certain recognised characteristics of a nation, such as a language.”
 “Does a dead language mean a dead nation in your view ? “Mr. Fitzgerald inquired.
 “A sick and weakly one, certainly; but not necessarily dead, if there are other marks to distinguish it from the particular nation by which it is supposed to have been absorbed. Ireland, for instance, diffe'rs from England in religion; the way of life of our people is absolutely different, even from that of agricultural England, to say nothing of industrial and commercial England; and even the laws we live under — half of them made by the Union Parliament — are quite different from English laws: a clear proof of the difference of the conditions of the two countries.”
 “You make out a good case,” said Mr. Fitzgerald. “I don’t deny that Ireland is a nation; and I never did, I think, though you may say that I have often done so in a negative way.”
 ”You don’t, perhaps; but many so-called Irishmen do. You heard Mr. Willoughby at Rivervale that day. All the planter class, at least the upper class settlers [...]

 The daily toll of death which the suppressors of the rebellion thought fit to take, a gruesome record read by the people morning after morning in the newspapers, produced in the minds of the dwellers in Kilteely, and indeed throughout Ireland, a sense at once of depression and a savage exasperation. Popular resentment against the government was fanned to angry but impotent hatred as the huge army of occupation, which had been drafted into the country, swept over the land with all the ostentatious paraphernalia of war, and carried off from farms and shops and labourers' cottages such men, young and old, as the police asserted were guilty of complicity in the outbreak, or at least of dangerous sympathy with its object. If mere sympathy constituted guilt none were taken who were not deserving of deportation and imprisonment and many such were left behind. But there was little method in the wholesale arrests and little semblance of justice in such method as there was. (p.316.)

 Though Con tried to disguise from himself the true significance of the course of events, he knew well that it had become as impossible for any man of spirit to remain indifferent to public affairs in Ireland as it was to be oblivious of them. The time had come when it was necessary for a man to be unequivocally upon the side of the people of Ireland or upon the side of the garrison. Con had no hesitation in making his choice. It was, indeed, inevitable; for during his twelve years at Rathcarrig he had been moving steadily towards a position to which circumstances now offered him no alternative, unless he was perpared to make a complete volte face. But it was not a mere desire to be consistent, nor was it anxiety to retain the popularity he had won among his neighbours, it was the firm conviction that his country was both ill-treated and misunderstood which caused him to throw in his lot unreservedly with the people at this crisis.
 It was not without some heartburnings and even some misgivings that he did this. (p.330.))

[...I]t was not until the simple act of singing a national song at a concert in Kilteely had brought upon Tommy MacMahon a heavy sentence with hard labour that Con finally cast his scruples to the winds and publicly threw in his lot with the party of “sedition.” (p.333.)

[335]

 To follow Con’s life further in any detail would be to become involved in the burning political questions of to-day, When arrest came, it came swiftly and without warning. His determined and uncompromising action in the face of the imminent menace of conscription had not only transformed him from a peaceful citizen into a leader of contingent rebellion, it had made him also a danger to the State in the eyes of the Government, and as such he was seized at the dead of night and carried away into captivity.
 His story is the story of many Irishmen, drawn against their will into the vortex of destructive politics, deflected from constructive activity by the effects of the political system upon their lives as individuals, and the greater the work of one man in the service of the nation the more certain his distraction from the personal to the public sphere. As Padraic Pearse left his educational work and James Connolly his labours on behalf of the masses, so Con was taken from his plough and his mill and from his gropings towards a newer and a better rural life. Con went later than they, and being less prominent in the public eye and having a less heroic part to play, his going was less conspicuous; but the causes which brought him, uncharged and untried, to an English prison differed in no essential from those which earned for the bodies of Pearse and Connolly their final resting place in unhallowed quicklime.
 Let us no longer quote the ancient poet: they went out to battle and they always fell. Such words in modern mouths are the language of despair; they belong to a passing generation which could take pride, aye, almost pleasure, in cherishing its misfortunes. Such morbid self-pity is not for us. The men of our generation may have fallen and may be [336] falling yet, but the work that they have done lives after them. Ireland has learned in the bitter school of experience that real freedom can be won not so much by political action as by laborious regeneration from within: by discipline, by effort, and by thought; by sacrifice and a strenuous endeavour rather than by lip-service in the pursuit of shadows. Now shadowy political nostrums have given place to something solid, based on a solid foundation. The causes for which Con’s support was won by the various influences of his life, from being the fads of a few cranks and enthusiasts, have become in little more than a score of years the main arteries of the revitalized life-blood of the nation. The rebirth of the nation is now an accomplished fact, and our ultimate freedom, even though it come not now, is assured.
 As to Con, we leave him in gaol, untried and unsentenced, and therefore uncertain of the duration of his confinement. At home Peggy suffered tortures of fear lest the lung which pneumonia had left weakened ten years or so before would give way and that Con would return to her a wreck. Such things have happened. They are part of the price which has to be paid for freedom by the less favoured small nations of the world. Everything was uncertain. Con knew well that if his deportation did not keep him from work for too long a period he need- not contemplate the fate of Rathcarrig with despair. The men of Rathcarrig had learned under him the meaning of discipline, and the fact that he had succeeded in maintaining it without injustice to individuals or undue favour was guarantee enough that the system he left behind him would continue to work in his absence. But he knew also that he was himself the mainspring of the mechanism: the hands would [337] move so long as the clock was wound, but eventually it would run down and then . . . .
 “I wish to God,” Con said to himself as he impotently paced his narrow cell, “we were allowed to work out our salvation — or even our damnation — in our own way. Then a man could work positively and not negatively for Ireland. All our striving to get rid of outside interference is a ghastly waste of time. As it is, our fight is not to reach the top of the ladder, but to get our feet on the bottom rung. We are fighting to reach our starting point, not our real goal.”
 When an opportunity for conversation next occurred Con expressed his pent-up feelings to another Irishman, who, like him, had been deported for political reasons.
 “When we get out,” replied his fellow-prisoner, a sanguine youth, “Ireland will be a free country.”
 “I doubt it,” said Con. “I often think the most of us are wasting our time outside as well as in here.”
 “Not at all,” was the reply. “Each of us did just what we were in honour bound to do: and so we're here. Ireland will soon be free and then things will right themselves.
 “I don’t know,” said Con. “Perhaps things are not quite so cheerless as they seem, but believe me, when we get out we'll find plenty of work to do, whether Ireland is free or not. An Irish republic doesn’t necessarily mean an Irish millenium.”
 “No,” replied the young man, “but it means that we'll have a chance of working for one.” [End.]