John Cunningham, McGrath Clan Historian

Mc Grath is among the sixty most common names in Ireland and is found in every county in the country. About half those of the name are found in Munster particularly in Tipperary, Cork, Clare and Waterford. These Mc Graths are generally of the Thomond branch of the Mc Graths who were poets to the O'Briens but in Tipperary there are a considerable number of the northern Mc Graths who came there in the 16th century with their kinsman Bishop Miler Mc Grath of Cashel of whom you will hear more later.

About a quarter of all the Mc Graths of Ireland come from the north where they are most common in Tyrone and adjacent areas of Donegal and Fermanagh. These Mc Graths were originally lords of Cenel Moen around Ballybofey in County Donegal but they were driven out or ethnically cleansed as we would hear it reported on the radio or television today and pushed first to the Ardstraw area of Tyrone near Castlederg and later to a fringe area around the famous pilgrimage lake of Lough Derg near Pettigo County Donegal. This was a sort of buffer area between the O'Donnells of Donegal and the Maguires who were the ruling clan in Fermanagh. A few miles from Ballybofey lies Carraig Mc Grath meaning Mc Graths Rock and this may have been the centre of the clan territory or perhaps the inauguration site of their chieftains.

There are two forms of the name in Irish, Mac Graith and Mag Raith and both mean "the son of Craith." In Donegal and Derry the name has been made MacGreagh and MacGra and in County Down MacGraw, Magraw and Megraw. Down through the centuries as the Irish people struggled to come to terms with the gradual Anglicisation of Ireland; a process of changing Irish surnames into English started. It began much later in the northwest of Ireland on account of the stern resistance to English rule there and Mc Grath in common with many other names took on many other forms. The counties of Fermanagh, Monaghan, Cavan, Tyrone, Derry and Donegal were only delineated by the English authorities as late as the end of the 1500s and were based on the dominant native clans of the area namely Maguire in Fermanagh, Mc Mahon in Monaghan, O'Reilly in Cavan, O'Neill in Tyrone, O'Kane in Derry and O'Donnell in Donegal.

It is interesting that the Pettigo area of County Donegal from which our northern chieftain Brendan Mc Grath here comes from was originally included in County Fermanagh. However because old Bishop Miler Mc Grath hated the Maguires of Fermanagh even more than he hated the O'Donnells of Donegal he got that area moved out of Fermanagh and into Donegal and I suppose if he had got his way he would have carved out a whole county for the Mc Graths themselves if he only had the chance. Anyhow during the process of Anglicisation some Mc Graths adopted Scottish and English names which sounded similar to their own and became Mc Creas and Mc Grades. Likewise since the Irish word for the heart is Craoi - as in Gra mo Craoi - some made a bogus English translation of Mc Gath into the name Hart and even more strangely into the name Love since the heart is supposed to be associated with love.

However leaving the name aside the clan became the dominant force in the area around Lough Derg about a thousand years ago with their headquarters at Alt Ruaidin near present day Pettigo and this means the Red Cliff. This is less than a mile from Lough Erne, which for centuries was the main highway of northwest Ulster along with the River Foyle, which flows into the sea at Derry. The Mc Grath lands stretched from the Erne to the headwaters of the Foyle and they dominated this land route between the two systems. As Christianity developed the clan became associated with the monastic island on Lough Derg and the place of pilgrimage it developed into. They became coarbs of the monastery, which is a title of the hereditary lay supervisors of the monastery lands and denotes descent from the group of the founder of the institution. This would make the northern Mc Graths around Pettigo descendants of St. Davog's clan since he founded the monastery there. Davog or Saint Davog, although he is listed as one of the great saints of Ireland, may or may not have been a pre-Christian deity or God of the area; an opinion put forward by Dr. Michael Harbinson one of early Ireland's foremost historians of today. Thus the Mc Graths may have been devotees of a deity called Davog and I know some here are keen on this priesthood or druidic origin of the clan Mc Grath and perhaps coincidently since our last gathering I have found a small lake not far from Lough Derg called Loch Na Druice or the Druids' Lake.

In the Medieval era Lough Derg was one of the great legends of the time. It was believed to be the entrance to the next world. The belief at the time was that when anyone died their soul went with the sun to the west to go to Heaven, Hell or to the cleansing fires of Purgatory before the soul could enter Heaven. Since there was no known place more westerly than Ireland a cave in Ireland was a natural supposition as the entrance to the Underworld. On Lough Derg there was a cave, which the pilgrim entered after a period of prayer and fasting, which could be anything up to 15 days. Pilgrims spent an entire night in the cave and during this time they had to stay awake and pray. Many experienced visions of Hell and Purgatory and wrote accounts of who they saw there and the terrible punishments that those people had to endure. I suppose that adfter such a long period of prayer and fasting anyone might see phantoms, deamons and other such terrible things.

These accounts of the Pilgrimage were part of a genre of medieval literature of which Dante's Divine Comedy is an example. Apparently, during the night demons tried to drag pilgrims away and some were believed to disappear in the cave and were never seen again. However those who survived by keeping their nerve and saying their prayers were believed to have removed all stain of sin from their souls and would now enter directly into Heaven when they died. Today we would call this symbolic death, burial in a cave and resurrection the following day as a Death and Rebirth experience where a person is reborn a better person much as in the term Born Again Christian and it is easy to imagine the early Mc Graths as shamans in charge of a preChristian site which later became Christianised.

The lands of the monastery were called Termon Lands and they were bounded by a river still today called the Termon River from the Latin word "terminus" meaning the end or the boundary. This land became known as Termon Mc Grath and the duties of the Mc Grath coarb of Lough Derg included providing food and other necessities of the monastery, making payments to the local Bishop of Clogher and lavishly entertaining any guests who made their way there. These lands had the power of santuary and no warring faction were supposed to make incursions into it. However they did and battles were fought there in 1043, it was plundered in 1070, plundered again in 1111 by Turlough O'Connor, King of Connaught, again in 1160 and again in 1169. It was obviously a turbulent part of the world. The first Mc Grath coarb of Lough Derg to be recorded in the ancient Irish Annals died in 1290. He was Giolla Adhamhnain MacCraith. The death of Nicholas Mc Grath the Coarb is recorded in 1340 and in 1384 the death of Lucia, daughter of the Coarb Muirish or Morris Mc Grath. Brendan has a brother Morris and it is interesting to see this recurring family name recorded over six hundred years ago. Brendan has another brother Fr. Sean Mc Grath who works in the missions in Brazil and in 1423 Sean Mor Mc Grath was made coarb on the death of his brother Mark. Sean Mor died in 1435 as the Annals record, "a gentleman who maintained a house of hospitality for all." A Matthew Mc Grath succeeded him and in 1440 Sean Bui son of Sean More took up the duties of coarb. Around the end of the 1400s the powerful Maguires of Fermanagh began to move in on the pilgrimage and probably this is the source of the enmity which later caused Miler Mc Grath to remove the Pettigo area from Fermanagh into Donegal. Later the Mc Graths reasserted themselves and there are numerous entries regarding them down to the dissolution of Lough Derg at the time of the Plantation of Ulster. Among the entries is one concerning William Mc Grath and his wife who both died within a day and a night and among the names of wives and daughters we get Graine, Margaret, Una, Finnoula and Annabel.

Towards the end of the 1500s Bishop Miler Mc Grath petitioned Queen Elizabeth to allow the surrender and regrant of the monastery lands to his father Donncha. The fact that Miler nor his father nor Queen Elizabeth had any right to these lands did not seem to bother any of them and the Church lands of the monastery of Lough Derg were surrendered to the Queen who then granted them back to Miler's father and later Miler and his son held them up until about the mid 1600s when Bishop Leslie of Clogher bought them from Miler's son on behalf of the Established church i.e the Church of Ireland and then highjacked them into the posession of his own family for the next two hundred and fifty years plus.

Miler Mc Grath himself is one of the great characters of the Mc Grath clan in every sense of the word. He gets given down the banks by almost everyone except his fan club which consists of myself and Fr. Paddy Ryan a native of Cashel where Miler was once the Protestant Archbishop there. Indeed Fr. Paddy is working hard on a life of Miler at the moment which should shed new light and perhaps a more balanced picture of this intelligent and complex man will emerge. To give Milers life in brief - he came from the Pettigo area and was a son of Donnacha a Giolla Gruama Mc Grath the coarb of Lough Derg. He joined the Franciscan Order in Donegal Town and had to have been a very intelligent man as he was soon fluent in Irish, English and Latin both spoken and written which is no mean feat at any time never mind back in those days. Anyhow Miler was ambitious and decided to go to Rome to seek an appointment as an Irish Bishop. He may have been presumptious but perhaps his learning set him apart.

He was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor and captured by the English from a Venetian ship on his way back and lodged in the infamous Tower of London. In time he managed to get free and arriving in his new Diocese found all the revenues were under the control of the O'Neills of Tyrone and there was little or nothing for him so he transfer his allegiance to the Protestant Church and became the first Protestant bishop of his home diocese of Clogher. His shift of religion did not go down well with the locals and he got another transfer (he sounds a bit like today's soccer players) this time to Cashel in County Tipperary. To protect him there he brought several hundred of his kinsfolk and neighbours and others to save him from the locals thereby causing a great influx of northern Mc Graths into the region. Many of these he rewarded with lands and benefices to cement their relationship to him.

He was married and had nine children and none of his family attended his services in Cashel Cathedral. He was reputed to be one of the most handsome men in Ireland at the time and a great swordsman and he carried on a constant intrigue with the Irish and the English, leaning or giving the impression of leaning, to either side as it suited him. He apparently drank like a fish all his days and still lived to be a hundred. He was detested by many of the Irish for becoming a Protestant and detested by many of the Protestants for being a very poor class of Protestant. There were constant complaints about him to Queen Elizabeth and he was twice summoned to London to give an account of his stewardship. He might well have lost his head on any of these trips but whether through his looks his charms or through other means he managed to please her majesty Queen Elizabeth, rout his enemies and come back to Ireland with more lands and benefices than he had before he left. In other words he was the despair of his enemies either political or religious. He died and is reputedly buried in his cathedral on the Rock of Cashel but even here he poses a problem for his enemies as the inscription on his tomb suggests that that he may not be buried here at all. Rumours abound that Miler came back to Catholicism before he died and he might have done but it is typical of Miler that he should keep everyone and anyone wondering what he was doing, what he had done and what he might do. He was a remarkable man and a born susvivor in troubled times.

In our own times we have still many remarkable Mc Graths. Brendan here and his brother Ciaran are very successful businessmen in Dublin and their brother Tom who is in business in New York entered the Guinness Book of Records by running from New York to San Francisco in a record time in 1977. Mc Graths have graced many fields of endevour in the past and continue to do so today. I saw Glen Mc Grath bowling for Australia a few days ago and wondered what part of Ireland his ancestors had come from. There is an area in Australia near Sydney where there is a major concentration of people whose ancestors came from Pettigo living in that area. Many of these were Mc Graths. Some years back they had a gathering of people and more than 400 turned up all with Pettigo roots. Next year we hope to have the clan gathering in Pettigo again among the northern Mc Graths and we hope to lay on a similar warm welcome to that we have received here today and which we also had in Durgarvan last year. In time we can help rebuild the clan unity which once was the hallmark of ancient Irish society using the present day means of communication with the Internet, genealogical sites and email. A book or series of books would also help to raise the clan profile.

Unfortunately to my knowledge I do not have any Mc Grath blood but they have had an effect on my life. I played with a famous and very successful County Fermanagh team for many years which was called Ederney on which numerous Mc Graths played for and all from Brendan's family, as soon as they were big enough joined the team. I normally played at right half back and Brendan and Ciaran were generally in the forwards while Brendan's brother was alongside me at centre half back and the late Colm Mc Grath, another of Brendan's brothers was behind me at corner back while Fr. Sean, yet another brother played at midfield. It was handy for no matter where you were on the field you could nearly always get a pass by just shouting "Here Mc Grath." For nearly any of them might have the ball.

I'll finish with a little story about the wife - no not that sort of a story - it concerns my relationship with the Mc Graths Clan in general. I mentioned earlier that Miler Mc Grath brought troops from the Pettigo area to protect him when he was made Archbishop of Cashel and included among them were numerous Monaghans and my wife is a Monaghan. These were sort of Miler's Mc Grath's Swiss Guards. Nans branch of the family are known as the "Weaver" Monaghans for obvious reasons. Unusually for an area where the second most common name in the locality after Mc Grath is Monaghan the "Weaver Monaghans" are related to few other Monaghans in the locality. The reason for this appears in the newspaper obituary of Arthur Monaghan whose occupation was naturally that of a weaver and who died around 1900. In this is stated that the family had left Tipperary in a time of national disturbance during the 1798 rebellion and had come to Pettigo. The choice of Pettigo can only have been because that was the area their family had left to go to Tipperary in the first place. They were returning to their home base and having been missing from the locality for perhaps 250 years therefore did not have the intricate marriage linkages of the rest of the local Monaghan families. So if Miler had not become etc etc and the 1798 Rebellion had not occurred and the Monaghans returned to Pettigo I would not have been married to Nan. Isn't it a complicated roundabout by which she got as good a man as me but then God is good to some people. Like nearly everybody else I have something to blame old Miler for.

Thank you.

John B. Cunningham 21-6-2001

Brendan McGrath, Chief of the McGrath Clans of the North, pictured outside McGrath Castle, Co. Fermanagh