Did Your Irish Ancestors Come from One of These Munster Counties?

Céad Míle Fáilte, and you are very welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. The mornings have turned here in Cork, with the swallows gathering on the wires, the blackberries ripening in the hedges, and there is a slight chill by nine o’clock that wasn’t there a fortnight ago. How are things in your part of the world today?

I have a cup of Barry’s Tea beside me as I write, and I hope you’ll join me with a cup of whatever you fancy yourself. Today I want to take you through the Irish province of Munster, and what came before these counties were established. Let’s look at how those Irish counties came to be, and why so many of our ancestors ended up on some of its poorest ground.

A Journey from Dublin to Cork

Carina and I were driving down from Dublin to Cork last week when we found the main motorway closed. We were diverted onto the old Cork road as we approached Cashel, Co Tipperary, a route neither of us had travelled for a long time. Then, as we rounded a corner, there it was: The Rock of Cashel.

It rises straight out of the plain, the limestone catching the last of the evening sun. We could only imagine how it must have looked to somebody coming towards it on foot eight hundred or a thousand years ago. A stronghold of stone above a wide and fertile plain, visible for miles in every direction, and for centuries the seat of the kings of Munster.

And it got me thinking about Munster itself. When you tell me that your ancestors came from Counties Cork, Clare, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford, you are naming only one layer of the place they knew. The county mattered, certainly, but underneath lay older kingdoms and Gaelic territories, and beneath those again the townlands and parishes that shaped everyday life.

Mumhain, One of the Fifths of Ireland

The Irish word for a province is “cúige” (pronounced “koo-ig-eh”) and it originally meant a fifth – one of the original five provinces of Ireland. Munster was one of those five, and its name comes from the old Irish “Mumhain”, or Cúige Mumhan. For hundreds of years the kingship of Munster was dominated by the great royal kindred known as the Eóganachta, and the Rock of Cashel we had just driven past was their royal centre. Then, during the tenth century, a new power rose from the north of Munster. These were the Dál gCais, and they took the kingship of Munster from the Eóganachta, and Cashel along with it. Their most famous son was Brian Boru.

When Munster Split in Two

In 1118, the king of Connacht, Turlough O’Connor, divided Munster in a way that would endure for centuries. The north went to the O’Briens of the Dál gCais and became “Tuadhmhumhain” meaning North Munster, which in English became Thomond. The south went to the MacCarthys of the Eóganachta and became Deasmhumhain meaning South Munster, which became Desmond.

So when you hear Munster names such as MacCarthy, O’Sullivan, O’Donoghue, O’Callaghan, O’Keeffe, O’Mahony or O’Driscoll, you are often looking towards the old world of Desmond. When you hear the Dál gCais surnames of Clare, Limerick and Tipperary such as O’Brien, McNamara, McMahon, Kennedy, you are looking towards Thomond. These were not neat lines on a map but kingdoms and lordships, and their boundaries moved with the fortunes of the families holding them.

How the Counties Came to Be

The Irish counties were gradually laid over the top of the older world divisions I have just described. Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Tipperary and Kerry have medieval origins, created in some form after the Anglo-Norman arrival, though they were not yet the settled units we know today and had to be reorganised under the Tudors.

Clare was formed last. It was the old kingdom of Thomond, shired in the sixteenth century and first assigned to Connacht, until the O’Briens pointed out that Thomond had belonged to the Munster world for centuries, and in 1602 it was permanently attached to Munster.

It is worth remembering all this the next time you enter a county into a family tree. The county is how many records are organised and often where we begin to research. But it is only one layer of place, for many of our ancestors the townland, the parish and the estate were far more immediate.

Nearly Three in Every Ten

When a census was taken for the whole island in 1841, just before the Great Famine, the population of Ireland was 8,175,124. Of those people, 2,396,161 lived in Munster, nearly three out of every ten in the country. County Cork alone held 854,118, making it the most populous county in Ireland. Tipperary had 435,553, Limerick 330,029, Kerry 293,880, Clare 286,394 and Waterford 196,187.

But where those people actually lived is the part worth paying attention to. What Carina and I were looking at around the Rock of Cashel was a wide, fertile plain that runs into the Golden Vale, the rich limestone country of Tipperary and Limerick, as good as almost any land in Europe. But this is not where most of the population in 1841 lived. Much of the best ground was in larger holdings and given over to grazing, while in many western districts a growing population had been pushed onto small and increasingly marginal land: the peninsulas of west Cork and Kerry, the mountain commonage, the western edge of Clare.

They had managed to survive there because of the potato. A family could feed itself from a remarkably small patch of poor ground in a way that would have been impossible with any other crop, so holdings were divided and sublet, generation after generation, while cultivation crept further up the hillsides.

Then the potato failed. Between 1841 and the next census in 1851, Munster had lost 22.5 per cent of its population. More than one person in every five had gone from the census within ten years, dying from disease or hunger, or taking the emigrant ship. Only Connacht lost more of her population than Munster. The American historian Kerby Miller made an observation about the Irish generation born around 1831: in Munster, only one in four died at home of old age.

The Most Beautiful Land in the World

And yet much of that hungry ground is now amongst the most photographed countryside in Ireland. The Beara Peninsula, Iveragh and the Ring of Kerry. Sheep’s Head and Mizen, the Dingle Peninsula, The Cliffs of Moher and the whole western shoulder of Clare. The Copper Coast of south Waterford. All places people travel from the far side of the world to stand and admire.

It remains beautiful partly because it was never easy ground to farm intensively. Yet people had to farm it at one time. If you know what you are looking for you can still see the old cultivation ridges beneath the grass, running across the hillsides above Allihies, Ballinskelligs and the Dingle roads, far higher than anyone would dream of planting potatoes now. Every one of those ridges was dug by hand, by somebody who needed that postage patch of poor ground to feed a large family.

I find it striking to think that the view that makes a visitor reach for their camera today is the same view somebody’s great-great-grandmother looked out upon every morning, wondering whether the crop would hold this year.

Back to the Rock

Today we can find out a great deal about our Munster ancestors. Griffith’s Valuation, surviving parish registers, census returns and civil records can often tell us where they lived, who they married, what land they occupied and where their children were baptised.

But what the records rarely tell us is what our ancestors thought of the place itself. Whether a hillside was a comfortable home or a life sentence and whether leaving was a wrench or a relief. If the beauty of it was visible at all to somebody who had to dig it?

And I found myself wondering much the same thing as Carina and I looked up at the Rock of Cashel in that evening light. Did our ancestors look on it with the same sense of wonder that stopped the two of us on the old road? Or was it simply there, an ancient stronghold above the plain, marking the power of kings, bishops and families whose names had shaped Munster for centuries?

So, let me leave you with a question today. Did your Irish ancestors come from one of the counties of Munster – Cork, Kerry, Clare, Limerick, Tipperary or Waterford? And do you know whereabouts in the county they lived?

Do leave your answer in the comments section below.

Slán for now,

Mike