I.  A Gaelic dynasty enters the language of heraldry

Heraldry came late to the Gaelic lords. It arrived in Ireland with the Anglo-Normans in the twelfth century — at first the business of imported knights and castle-building earls. By the late sixteenth century the great Gaelic lordships of the north and west, long accustomed to their own poetic modes of praise and pedigree, were being fitted into the same paper regime of shields, tinctures and registered grants. The Office of Arms at Dublin Castle, founded in 1552 under the Ulster King of Arms, had become the state recorder of Irish heraldic identity. It is there that the O'Dubhda first enter the written heraldic record.

Three distinct coats of arms — and a later bishop's ecclesiastical difference — carry the name across four centuries. Each has its own story. Between them they trace the family's long arc from ruling dynasty of Northern Uí Fhiachrach to exile, emigration and episcopal office.

II.  The 1574 arms — black saltire, gold field

The oldest is also the most authentic. A 1574 line-drawing, still preserved in the archive of the Chief Herald of Ireland in Dublin, gives the earliest surviving rendering of O'Dubhda arms. The Taoiseach of Tireragh at that date was Cathal Dubh Ó Dubhda, who signed the sixteenth-century Historia et Genealogia Familiae de Burgo — a manuscript today in the library of Trinity College Dublin. Cathal Dubh died in 1582; his nephew Éamonn succeeded him and died without issue five years later. The arms, however, endured.

The shield is gold, crossed by a black saltire — the diagonal Cross of St Andrew. Between the upper arms of the saltire are two crossed swords; in base is a single green oak leaf. Above the shield rises the crest: an arm clad in mail, grasping a spear, issuing from a golden crown.

These arms were recorded again in a manuscript of 1694 under the spelling O'Dowde, and in a fuller 1784 manuscript — crest included — attributed to James O'Dowda of Castleconnor (d. 1640) and his son Tadhg Riabhach. John O'Donovan described them in 1844 in The Tribes and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach. This is the coat of arms borne today by the Taoiseach and the Clan Association.

Motto: Virtus ipsa suis firmissima nititur armis — "Courage itself stands firmest on its own arms."

III.  The 1608 arms — gold saltire, green field

The most widely reproduced O'Dowd shield is not the oldest. The tinctures are inverted: a green shield crossed by a gold saltire, with two swords in chief but no oak leaf in base. The crest drops the royal crown and shows the mailed arm lowering its spear.

The grant is attributed to Donal O'Dowd of Ardnaglass in 1608 — the ancestor of the O'Dowds of Mayo. Donal was present with Dónal Cam Ó Súilleabháin Béara at the siege of Dunboy in 1602, one of the last catastrophic stands of Gaelic Munster, and is thought to have joined O'Sullivan's legendary winter march north to Connacht in the following weeks. In 1614 he married Slany O'Brien of Dromoland and Lemeneagh, linking the O'Dubhda of Tireragh to the Gaelic nobility of Thomond; his granddaughter Dorothy later married David O'Dowda of Bonniconlon in 1656, drawing the two principal surviving branches of the family back together.

These arms reached print first in 1816, and were then reproduced by Burke, O'Hart and a long line of Victorian and Edwardian heraldic compilers — which is why they tend to appear, wrongly, as "the" O'Dowd arms in most reference books. By long custom they are now borne by the Tánaiste of the clan.

IV.  The Dublin doves — a canting shield

The third coat is the strangest, and the most poetic. It is recorded in a manuscript of 1714 — now kept in the cathedral library at Cashel — under the name Ó Dubhda. The shield is silver, charged with five red doves, arranged two, one, two. The crest is a single red dove; the motto Innocens ut columba, "innocent as a dove."

The arms are almost certainly canting arms — a visual pun on the name. Dubh in Irish means dark or black, but to an English-speaking herald "dove" echoes "Dubhda" closely enough to earn the joke its place on a shield.

Mac Hale (1990) offers a second reading that turns the pun into elegy. In 1452, after a devastating internal civil war in Tireragh, Aodh (Hugh) Ó Dubhda survived and fled east to the English Pale. Four of his brothers had been killed defending the fifty-eight townlands he later claimed as his by right in a sworn affidavit. Add Aodh himself, or a fifth brother, and you have five Ó Dubhdas lost in a single convulsion. Five doves on the shield of their exiled house.

Aodh told his witnesses he would not return to Tireragh; but that his descendants might one day wish to. The Dowds of Dublin, bearing these arms, are thought to be his line.

V.  A bishop's difference — James T. O'Dowd, 1948

Four centuries after Cathal Dubh, the old shield was put to new use. On 22 May 1948, Pope Pius XII appointed James Thomas O'Dowd (1907–1950) Titular Bishop of Cea and Auxiliary Bishop of San Francisco. As ecclesiastical custom permitted, the new bishop chose a personal coat of arms — and chose to build it out of his clan's ancient shield.

He kept the black saltire on a gold field of 1574 (the saltire, being itself a form of Cross, was apt for a cleric). At its centre he placed a scallop shell — emblem of St James, his own baptismal patron and the pilgrim saint of Santiago. In chief, in place of the warlike crossed swords, he set a single blue star — the Star of the Sea — in remembrance of his home parish, Our Lady, Star of the Sea.

Around the shield, in place of a crest, the ornaments of his rank: a precious mitre, a processional cross, a crozier, and above them a green pontifical hat with six tassels on each side arranged in three rows — the canonical mark of a bishop. His motto, carried by no other O'Dowd, was Cor unum in Christo — "one heart in Christ."

Bishop O'Dowd served only eighteen months. On 3 February 1950, aged forty-two, he was a passenger in a car that stopped on railroad tracks outside San Francisco and was struck by a freight train. He died of his injuries the following day. A Catholic high school in Oakland still bears his name.

VI.  Reading the symbols

In the older heraldic grammar, every element on an O'Dubhda shield carried a settled meaning:

• Saltire — resolution; the diagonal cross carried by those who had scaled the walls of a town.
• Black (sable) — constancy.
• Gold (or) — generosity.
• Green (vert) — antiquity and strength, with hope and joy.
• Crossed swords — military honour, the defence of the faith.
• Spear — knightly service.
• Oak leaf — longevity; the old tree of the kingdom.
• Crown — royal authority. The O'Dubhda had been kings of Northern Connacht for more than two centuries before these arms were drawn.
• Dove — peace and innocence; and, just possibly, the name itself sounding back.

None of this is decorative. Read plainly, the 1574 shield says: a royal house, constant and generous, defenders of the faith by arms and by knightly service, rooted in the oldest ground of Connacht.

VII.  A note on authority

All three O'Dubhda coats of arms were first recorded in the Office of Arms at Dublin Castle, under the Ulster King of Arms — a Crown office founded in 1552. In 1943 that office was closed and its functions passed to the newly created Office of the Chief Herald of Ireland, which survives today within the National Library of Ireland. The 1574, 1694 and 1784 manuscripts are preserved in the Chief Herald's archive in Dublin; the 1714 doves manuscript is held in the cathedral library at Cashel.

By settled custom, the 1574 arms are carried by the Taoiseach and the Clan Association, and the 1608 Ardnaglass arms by the Tánaiste. Cathal Dubh's shield — with its crown and its old oak leaf — travels as the shared mark of the O'Dubhda of today.

VIII.  Sources

• Conor Mac Hale, The O'Dubhda Family History (Enniscrone, 1990), pp. 18–20.
• John O'Donovan (ed.), The Genealogies, Tribes, and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach (Irish Archaeological Society, Dublin, 1844).
• Pádraig Ó Gill, Peadar O'Dubhda (Éigse Oirghialla, 1981).
• Office of the Chief Herald of Ireland, Dublin — manuscripts of 1574, 1694, 1714 and 1784.
• Sir Bernard Burke, General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales; John O'Hart, Irish Pedigrees.
• For Bishop O'Dowd: Catholic Hierarchy; Archdiocese of San Francisco records; Wikipedia, "James Thomas O'Dowd".