The MacFirbis Memorial at Skreen

A stone chair to Dubhaltach Mac Fhir Bhisigh — the last great Gaelic genealogist

Just off the R297 coastal road between Ballina and Sligo, at the edge of the parish of Skreen, a tall dark-limestone chair sits on a low paved plinth overlooking the fields that roll toward the sea. It was cut in 2015 by the sculptor Martha Quinn. The chair marks the place where, in January 1671, Dubhaltach Mac Fhir Bhisigh — scholar, genealogist, and the last of the great hereditary learned family of Tír Fhiachrach — was murdered.

I. The hereditary genealogists of Tír Fhiachrach

Dubhaltach was born at Lackan, Co. Sligo, about the year 1600, into a family whose scholarship stretched back many generations before him. The Mac Fhir Bhisighs were ollamh — professional historians and genealogists — in the service of the O’Dubhda chiefs of Tír Fhiachrach. Around 1400 one of Dubhaltach’s forebears, Giolla Íosa Mór Mac Fhir Bhisigh, compiled the Great Book of Lecan and the major part of the Yellow Book of Lecan — two of the most important surviving medieval Irish manuscripts. Literate in Irish, Latin and English, Dubhaltach received his own education in Galway and at the Mac Aodhagáin school at Ballymacegan, Co. Tipperary.

II. The Great Book of Irish Genealogies

Dubhaltach transcribed, translated and compiled a vast body of learned work — collections of Irish annals, early Irish law tracts, saints’ lives, and poetry. His principal work was Leabhar Mór na nGenealach, the Great Book of Irish Genealogies, written mostly in Galway around 1650. A shorter version, the Cuimre, was written here in Tír Fhiachrach in 1666. For anyone researching O’Dubhda descent — or the descent of almost any medieval Irish family, political, ecclesiastical or learned — the Great Book remains one of the foundational sources. A complete edition with English translation, prepared by Nollaig Ó Murai´le, was published in 2004.

III. The murder at Doonflin

In January 1671 Dubhaltach was killed near this spot, in the townland of Doonflin. The killer was Thomas Crofton, an Anglo-Irish gentleman of the new Restoration settler class; the precise circumstances are now unclear. Tradition holds that Dubhaltach was stabbed over a trivial argument in a shop. Whatever the provocation, the killing removed the last man in Ireland carrying the full hereditary memory of the Gaelic genealogical tradition in an unbroken line.

IV. The memorial

A first monument was erected near the spot of Dubhaltach’s death in 1931. It was replaced in 2015 by the present work — a scholar’s chair cut in dark limestone, tall-backed and large enough for a visitor to sit in. The chair deliberately echoes the ollamh’s seat of learning. At its top, the name An Dubhaltach Mac Fhir Bhisigh is incised in Gaelic uncial script. A bilingual plaque in English and Irish, mounted on a low wall beside the chair, sets out the scholar’s life and work.

V. Éigse Mhic Fhirbhisigh

Modern research on Dubhaltach is deeply indebted to Éigse Mhic Fhirbhisigh, the annual scholarly gathering held at Enniscrone between 1971 and 1987. The lectures and papers from those years laid much of the foundation for later scholarship on Dubhaltach’s life and manuscripts. In recent years the Sligo Field Club has given further support to the work.

Sources

• Plaque text erected at the memorial, NRA / Wild Atlantic Way, 2015
• Nollaig Ó Murai´le (ed.), Leabhar Mór na nGenealach / The Great Book of Irish Genealogies, 5 vols (De Búrca, 2003–04)
• Joseph Mac Hale, Tír Fhiachrach (1990)
• Tomás O’Reilly & Joseph Mac Hale, O’Dowda Country Stories (2018)