An Irish legend in his local landscape

An Irish legend in his local landscape
Murtaí Óg: Murtaí Óg Ó Súilleabháin (c. 1710-54): a life contextualised

by Gerard J. Lyne, (Geography Publications, €25.00)

Here once again this author writes with authority about his local area.  His The Lansdowne Estate in Kerry under the agency of William Steuart Trench, 1849-72 was a classic account of an Irish landlord’s agent in the nineteenth century.

Murtaí  Óg, however, was quite a different kind of person,  but he was also a central figure in the history and legends of the far south-west.

Murtaí  Óg was born near Eyries in Co Cork c. 1710.  A member of the O’Sullivan Beare Clan, he was sent to the continent to be educated.  It is likely that he attended a military academy in Spain.  He fought in the War of the Austrian Succession on the side of Empress Maria Theresa.  For his service he was rewarded by the queen and promoted to be a captain in Lord Clare’s regiment of the Irish Brigade.

He later served under Lord Clare at the battle at Fontenoy.  A life-long Jacobite, it was claimed that he was at the battle of Culloden in 1746.  On his escape from Scotland he married and was engaged in smuggling and recruiting for the armies of France.

In the former enterprise he was in league with a local loyalist named John Puxley.  Eventually Puxley was ‘turned’ by the government and commissioned to curb smuggling in the Beara Peninsula.  It was alleged that Puxley was then responsible for the deaths of two members of the O’Sullivan Beare Clan.  Murtaí Óg publicly stated that he would exact revenge for the killings.  With his manservant, Domhnall Ó Conaill, and a giant, known as Little John Sullivan, he ambushed and shot John Puxley as he was on his way to Divine Service in 1754.

The government issued a proclamation that Murtaí Óg and his fellow assailants be brought to justice.  For the government Murtaí was already a marked man because of his extensive recruiting activities.  These even threatened the loyalty of members of the crown forces.  Thus on one occasion he poached no less than forty-nine members of the Cork City garrison as recruits for the Irish Brigade in France.

Murtaí  Óg escaped to France.  However, he returned occasionally to visit his wife and son.  On one such occasion with the assistance of a spy a fifty-strong detachment of soldiers from the Cork City garrison surrounded his house.  He and twenty of his followers resisted their attacks, but his house was set on fire and as he rushed out he was shot dead.

The soldiers returned to Cork bringing with them Murtaí Óg’s body and Ó Conaill and Little John Sullivan, both of whom were soon afterwards executed and the decapitated heads of all three were spiked over the south gate of the city jail.

In this study Gerard Lyne demonstrates the importance of oral tradition in fleshing-out the biography of persons, such as Murtaí Óg.

One of his major sources is ‘Marbhna Dhomhaill UÍ Chonaill’.  This was the lament by Murtaí Óg’s manservant for his master, which he composed in Cork jail as he awaited his execution.  A chapter is dedicated to the analysis of this Marbhna and others on John Puxley.

Economic Conditions

Gerard Lyne succeeds admirably in contextualising Murtaí Óg.  In so doing he provides an expert analysis of the socio-economic conditions of the period, and the curious interface between the old Gaelic chieftain families and the local representatives of the new regime.  And in achieving this he reveals what remained in the Beara Peninsula of  what Daniel Corkery  once famously called The Hidden Ireland.