Peadar Ó Doirnín

Life
(?1700-1769); b. nr. Dundalk (though assigned to Cashel, Co. Tipperary in an account by John O”Daly); tutor to family of Arthur Brownlow of Lurgan; m. Rose Toner; hedge-school master at Forkhill; believed active as a Whiteboy, c.1740; copied Keating”s Foras Feasa ar Eirinn in extant manuscript; mocks Muiris Ó Gormáin for lack of English; love poems include “Mná na hEireann”, “M’Uilleagán Dubh O”, and well-known “Ur-Chnoc Chéin Mhic Cáinte”; others incl. drinking song “Captain Fuiscí”; his poetry reflects political confusions of period and a devotion to the pleasures of the flesh; wrote verse in English to Irish metres; bur. Urney Urnea], on Louth-Armagh border.

Works
Breandán Ó Buachalla, ed., Peadar Ó Doirnín: Amhráin (1969).

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Commentary

Antonia McManus, The Irish Hedge School and Its Books, 1695-1831 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2004):

One master who risked his liberty towards this end was Ó Doirnín, who taught Irish in Armagh. He was forced to go into hiding to escape arrest, after he was caught doing so. He took up residence in a cave where he composed an Irish poem, “A Ghaeilge mhilis is sáimhe fonn”, to mark the event in which he praised the beauty of the Irish language but regretted the hazards involved in teaching it.

“A Ghaeilge mhilis is sáimhe fonn,
Mear mór láidir mar réab na dtonn,
Níor choir do labhairt i bhFódla am
Is ní bhíodh do bhaird-mhil i nguais a gceann”

O Sweet Irish tongue of the beguiling airs,
Swift, bold, strong as the beating waves,
’Twas no crime once to speak you...

Cited by Susan Parlour on Facebook, 04.05.2025.

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Notes
Antonia McManus completed The Irish Hedge School [... &c.] (2010) as a PhD at Trinity College, Dublin [TCD] under the title of “The Groves of Academus”: A Study of Hedge Schools and Their Reading Books 1694-1831 (TCD 2000). She has also published Irish Education: the ministerial legacy, 1919-99 (Dublin: The History Press Ireland 2014), 356pp.