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Life
1689-1728; astronomer and politician; son of William Molyneux, MA TCD, 1710; FRS, 1712; Sec. to George Prince of Wales, and MP Bossiney (1715) and St. Mawes (1726); MP Dublin University 1727; endeavoured to determine stellar annular parallax; lord of admiralty 1727; privy councillor of England and Ireland; the Molyneux Papers are held in Southampton City Records Office while other manuscript writings including his accounts of Connaught, Ulster and Kerry are preserved in TCD Library. ODNB DIB OCIL
Works
‘Natural History of Ireland, &c.’ [TCD MS 883]; ‘Journey to Connaught’, April 1709 (TCD MS 884); ‘Journey to Kerry’, July 1709 (TCD MS 885); ‘Journey to the North’, August 1708 (TCD MS888/2 fols 183-88) [the last edited as by Thomas Molyneux in R. M. Young, ed., Historical Notices of Old Belfast, Belfast: Marcus Ward & Co. 1896, p.152.]
His “Journeys” rep. in R. M. Young ed., Historical Notices of Old Belfast (1896); A. Smith, ed., Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society, I (1846); and The Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society Journal, III (1970). [Note that the pieces on Connaught and Ulster are erroneously identified with Sir Thomas Molyneux in the first two of the above-named publications.]
A. Smith, ed., ‘Journey to Connaught, April 1709’, in Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society, 1 (1846), pp.161-178 [this text erroneously attributed to Thomas Molyneux by J. P. Leerssen under Roderic O’Flaherty, infra.]
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Quotations
Iar-Chonnacht in 1709: ‘[N]or could I conceive an inhabited country so destitute of all signs of people and art as this is, yet here I learn, lived multitudes of barbarous, uncivilised Irish.’ (Cited in Kevin Whelan, ‘The Basis of Regionalism’, in Prionsias Ó Drisceoil, ed., Culture in Ireland, Regions, Identity and Power [Proceedings of the Cultures of Ireland Group Conference, 27-29 Nov. 1992] (QUB: Inst. of Irish Studies 1993), p.41.
Commentary
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; rep. 1984) evades the problem of identifying which Molyneux is the author of the following quotation, remarking on a note of censure on Ireland’s rural Latinity in the [TCD] Molyneux papers: ‘The inhabitants of the county of Kerry - I mean those of them that are downright Irish - are remarkable beyond the inhabitants of the other parts of Ireland for their Gaming, Speaking of Latin, and Inclination to Philosophy and dispute therein ... . When they can get no one to Game with them, you shall often find them with a Book of Aristotle’s or some of the Commentators Logic which they read very diligently till they be able to pour out Nonsensical Words a whole day about universale a parte rei, ens rationis and suchlike all the while their Latin is Bald and Barbarous and very often not Grammatical for in the heat of a dispute they stick not at breaking Priscians head very frequently.’ (Molyneux Papers, TCD, MS. 1, 4, 19, f. 92 v; Stanford, op. cit., pp.26-27.)
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