Connor O'Mahony

Alfred Webb

A Compendium of Irish Biography

1878

O'Mahony, Connor, a member of the Society of Jesus, who lived in the 17th century. Considerable excitement was created in Ireland by the anonymous publication, in 1645, of his work: Disputatio Apologetica de Jure Regni Hiberniae pro Catholicis Hibernis adversus Haereticos Anglos, authore C. M. Hiberno, Artium et Sacrae, Theologiae Magistro, a small 4to. of some 130 pp., published nominally at Frankfort, but more probably in Portugal. It was a violent denunciation of English Protestant rule in Ireland, and an appeal to the Irish Catholics to root out the English as the Israelites had rooted out and massacred their enemies. Although at once burnt by order of the Supreme Council of Kilkenny, denounced by the corporation of Galway, and preached against by Peter Walsh, this book was productive of lamentable consequences. It embittered the feeling between Protestants and Catholics, and O'Mahony's rhetorical flourish about the killing of 150,000 of "the heretics" between 1641 and 1645, has ever remained an argument in the hands of those who sought to fasten the disgrace of a deliberate and hideous massacre upon the Irish people. O'Mahony was living, an old man, in Lisbon about 1650. His book was reprinted in Dublin in 1826.

Sources

104a. Disputatio Apologetica. [Connor O'Mahony.] 1645. Dublin reprint, 1826.

330. United Irishmen, their Lives and Times: Third Series: Robert R. Madden, M.D. 3 vols. Dublin, 1846.

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