Seanchas — Stories, News & Gatherings
April 26, 2026 2026-04-27 1:53Seanchas — Stories, News & Gatherings
Seanchas
Seanchas
/ˈSHAN-ə-kəs/ — the old Irish word for the lore a community keeps alive: stories, history, lineages, news from the road, and word from the people who carry it.
A seanchaí was the keeper of the seanchas — not a single voice, but a tradition tended by many. This page is the clan’s seanchas in our own time: research updates, rally reports, castle pieces, member essays, and news as it happens.
Browse the seanchas by theme
Every story we publish is filed under one of these four threads. Click through for the full archive of each.
Word from the road
Recent posts across all categories
A Pint at Two O’Dowd’s: The Family Ordinary in Ballina
A small pub on Bury Street with our name on the door, John O’Dowd behind the bar, and President Biden’s Ballina story on the
From Rally to Homecoming
A note from the Taoiseach. For seventy years we called these gatherings rallies. Going forward, the O’Dubhda clan will call them what they have
The O’Dubhda Challenge: Running a Thousand Years of Tireragh
On the first Sunday of October, runners in O’Dubhda-blue gathered on the Main Street of Enniscrone for a course that traces, almost without meaning
Castle-Hunting with a 400-Year-Old Map: What Baxter c.1600 Tells Us About Lost O’Dubhda Strongholds
An Elizabethan spy-map in the Royal Museums Greenwich Dartmouth Collection draws a red-ink banner across the Sligo coast — “O Dowdes Countrie” — and
On the Maps: how we became “O Dondey”
On two early-seventeenth-century maps of Ireland — Speed 1610 and Boazio 1606 — the O’Dubhda chief appears on the Sligo coast under an unfamiliar
How Many Castles Did the O’Dowds Actually Have? (More Than You Think — and We’re Still Counting)
The popular ’20 castles’ figure keeps growing as new field reports, old maps, and survey records turn up O’Dubhda sites no one had counted.
The 2025 Rally — Silver Jubilee of the Inauguration
The 2025 rally marked the Silver Jubilee of the Brehon inauguration. Sean O’Dowda Stephens was inaugurated Taoiseach on Coggins’ Hill, with a rowan sapling
The Dog’s Battleflag
The wolfhound carved on a stone from Ardnaglass Castle was never meant as a clan emblem. Four hundred years later it has become the
The Inauguration of the Ó Dubhda
Thanks to the Mac Fhirbhisigh historians at Lecán, the O’Dubhda inauguration rite is among the best-documented in Gaelic Ireland. Here’s what the surviving records
Gaelic Inaugurations: What They Tended to Include (1100–1600)
Gaelic chiefs were not crowned but inaugurated — outdoors, on ancestral mounds, with white wands and sacred sandals. A survey of what these ceremonies
Guardians of the Coast: The Story of Rathlee Signal Tower and Ireland’s Napoleonic ’10 Pound Castles’
Built against a feared French invasion, the squat coastal towers of the early 1800s — Ireland’s ‘ten pound castles’ — still face the Atlantic
Unearthing the O’Dowd Legacy: The Enduring Mystery of the “Twenty Castles”
The legend of an O’Dowd kingdom ‘ringed with twenty castles’ isn’t poetic flourish — it describes a real defensive network across Mayo and Sligo.
A Note from the Clan
The seanchas is gathered by volunteers — council members, members of the diaspora, and friends of the clan. We try to mark sources where we can and correct ourselves in plain sight when we get something wrong.
If you have a story, a correction, a photograph, or news worth sharing, get in touch. Every clan needs a seanchaí.
