Donough Mor O'Daly

Alfred Webb

A Compendium of Irish Biography

1878

O'Daly, Donough Mor, a distinguished bard, styled by the Four Masters "chief of Ireland for poetry," was head of the O'Dalys of Finnyvarra, in the County of Clare. He died at Boyle, and was interred in the Abbey there, in 1244. O'Reilly says that his poems are principally of a religious or moral character, possessing considerable merit, but not such as to entitle him to the unqualified praise bestowed upon him by the Four Masters. O'Donovan says: "There is certainly no family to which the bardic literature of Ireland is more deeply indebted than that of O'Daly." The Four Masters mention some seventeen bards of the name, and O'Reilly, in his Irish Writers, twenty-eight. An interesting account of the family, by O'Donovan, is prefixed to Aengus O'Daly's Tribes of Ireland. Donough was ancestor of Denis Daly, a distinguished member of the Irish Parliament.

Sources

263a. O'Daly, Aengus: Tribes of Ireland. Dublin, 1852.

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