John O’Daly


Life
1800-1878 [as on title-pages; also John Daly]; b. Farnane, Co. Waterford; ed., hedge-schools; taught Irish at Wesleyan College, Kilkenny; moved to Dublin and set up as printer and bookseller in Angelsea St.; commissioned and published Edward Walsh translations as Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry (1844); wrote and published Self-Instruction in Irish (1846); founding secretary of Ossianic Society, 1853; retained contact with Gaelic poets and scholars such as Patrick Farham in Dingle, Co. Kerry, and Art Mac Bionaid, in Forkhill, Co. Armagh;
 
corresponded with Nicholas O’Kearney who edited Feis Tighe Chonáin for the Ossianic Society founded in his Anglesea St. house in 1853; issued Michael Kearney, trans., The Kings of the Race of Eibhear (1847), being the poem of John O’Dugan [Seán Mór Ó Dubhagáin]; commissioned and published Mangan versifying the prose translations in The Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849), 1st Series [George Sigerson’s edition being the second]; also Irish Miscellany: Being a Selection of the Poems of the Ulster Bards of the Last Century (1876) and Key to the Study of Gaelic (Boston 1899). DIW DIH RAF FDA OCIL
  • Bibliotheca Hibernica No. 21 (November 1860) - or, A Catalogue of New and Second-hand Books [...] , Manuscripts [...] , privately printed books, Irish music [... &c.] (John O’Daly 1860).

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Commentary
Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde: The Dawn of the Irish Revolution and Renaissance, 1874-1893 (Shannon: IUP 1974): ‘It was at O‘Daly's house at 19 Anglesea St. that the meeting was held establishing the Ossianic Society to which he was publisher. Hyde honours him in Mise agus Connradh as the man who did most to popularise Irish, in his way as a publisher. (Mise, p.17) [35] O’Daly could tell Hyde how Mangan used come to his office and stretch across the counter, putting into verse the literal translations of Gaelic poems. Dominic Daly works out in a footnote [199] that it must have been years before his college days that Hyde knew him, since O’Daly died two years before Hyde entered TCD.’

 

Quotations
‘That which I now present to the reader I found in an unpublished manuscript translation of Dr. Keating’s Foras Feasa Ar Eirinn; made by a celebrated scribe Michael Kearney, of Ballyloskye, in the County of Crosse Tipperary; who, being a contemporary of his learned author, began the task, A.D. 1635, which he brought to a successful close in 1668; it ... is now in the hands of a gentleman in this city.’ (Cited Russell Alspach, Irish Poetry ... to 1798, 1959, p.82.)

 

References
Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, 1789-1850 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980), Vol. 2, cites Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry (1844); Self-Instruction in Irish (Daly 1846); Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849); also cites Seán Ó Dubhagáin, The King of the Race of Eibhear, ed. J. Daly, with trans. by M. Kearney (Dublin 1847).

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 2, selects from Poets and Poetry of Munster, ‘An rabh Tú ag an gCarraig?’, translated by Mangan [79-80]; remarks at 5, 6, 35, 40, 41, 96 [recte 97], 98, but no biog. With Eugene O’Curry, he is one of the Gaelic antiquarians overlooked in the anthology, considered as a reflection of the cultural history which is so close to its professed concerns.

University of Ulster (Morris Collection) holds Irish Miscellany, being a selection of the poems of the Ulster bards of the last century (1876); Self-Instruction in Irish or a primer of spelling and pronunciation with easy readings lessons for beginners (1871).

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