Seanchas — Stories, News & Gatherings
April 26, 2026 2026-05-07 1:39Seanchas — 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
The Name We Carry: What the Placenames Branch Told Us
Dr Conchubhar Ó Crualaoich, Ireland’s Chief Placenames Officer, on the spelling of our name. O’Dubhda was a hybrid; Ó Dubhda is the correct form;
Not Every Apple in the Barrel
Every family of half a million produces a few people who would rather you not mention them at the reunion. Two stories about Ó
Help Me Find the Lost Dowds
There are perhaps half a million of us alive in the world. The clan, as a working organisation, has three hundred and fifty active
How many Ó Dubhda are there?
Centuries of famine, migration, and anglicisation scattered the descendants of the ancient Ó Dubhda clan across the world. Today, roughly 60,000 people still carry
What AI Saw on a 1600 Map of O Dowdes Countrie
I took my kids haphazardly to Parke’s Castle one afternoon and photographed a hand-painted wall map without thinking. Years later AI re-read the same
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 Ó Dubhda clan will call them what they
The Ó Dubhda Challenge: Running a Thousand Years of Tireragh
On the first Sunday of October, runners in Ó Dubhda-blue gathered on the Main Street of Enniscrone for a course that traces, almost without
Castle-Hunting with a 400-Year-Old Map: What Baxter c.1600 Tells Us About Lost Ó 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 Ó Dubhda chief appears on the Sligo coast under an
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 Ó Dubhda sites no one had
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
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.
