This story really began for me in 2011. I had become interested in the Fitzpatrick name and, like most people beginning family research at that time, I started looking online to see what was already known. I found the Fitzpatrick DNA Project, then headed by Colleen Fitzpatrick, contacted her, and she helped me arrange my first Y-DNA test through HeritageDNA. It was only a 25-marker test, primitive compared with what we can do today, but those first results ended up changing the direction of my research for the next fifteen years.
My DNA placed me in what was then the second-largest defined group in the project, a cluster called the Nine of Clads. The important thing was that this group appeared genetically separate from the Fitzpatrick line associated with the Mac Giolla Phádraig dynasty of Ossory. That was immediately interesting, because almost everything written about the Fitzpatrick surname treated Ossory as the starting point. If you were a Fitzpatrick, the assumption was that somewhere behind you stood the Mac Giolla Phádraig of Kilkenny and Laois.
The explanation for the northern Fitzpatricks seemed wonderfully simple. One old account, repeated through later histories, stated:
“The Fitzpatricks are still found in the Queen’s County but are much more numerous in the Counties of Cavan and Leitrim, to which they were driven at an early period by the English.”
Woulfe offered much the same solution, describing the Cavan Fitzpatricks as a family originally derived from the Fitzpatricks of Ossory.
And that was more or less it.
The Cavan and Leitrim Fitzpatricks had supposedly come from Ossory. Nobody seemed particularly troubled that there was no convincing historical record describing such a migration. Nobody seemed concerned that Mac Giolla Phádraig simply did not appear as the important northern surname we ought to find if a substantial branch of that family had been driven into Cavan and Leitrim. The DNA was already showing that the major northern group was not the same paternal family as the principal Ossory group, yet the historical explanation had barely changed.
At the time I knew very little about any of this. I certainly did not know enough to challenge generations of received history. But I could not get past one simple question:
If the Cavan Fitzpatricks were not the Ossory Fitzpatricks, who were they?
The Fitzpatricks who “went to Connacht”
There was another problem that became increasingly obvious the deeper I went. Most Fitzpatrick history naturally revolved around Ossory. The surviving castles were there. The barons were there. The famous pedigrees were there. The historical gatherings and much of the organised family research centred on the Mac Giolla Phádraig dynasty and its descendants.
The northern Fitzpatricks were largely an extension of that story. They were the people who had supposedly been driven away. Their history could therefore be explained in a sentence: they were Mac Giolla Phádraig who no longer lived in Kilkenny or Laois.
I was never satisfied with that.
Where was the movement?
Where were the records of these displaced Mac Giolla Phádraig arriving in Bréifne?
Why did their supposed ancestral surname not appear throughout the northern records?
Why did the DNA show such a clear distinction?
And why, if Cavan and Leitrim contained so many Fitzpatricks, did nobody really seem to know who these people had been before they became Fitzpatrick?
That last question eventually became the most important one.
Because the answer was hiding in plain sight.
They had another name.
Ó Maol Phádraig.
Finding Ó Maol Phádraig
I first contacted Dr Mike Fitzpatrick in 2012. I knew almost nothing compared with what I know today, and I am sure some of my early theories and questions gave him plenty to think about. What followed was more than a decade of discussion, DNA research, disagreements, new records, discarded theories and increasingly detailed attempts to understand the families behind the Fitzpatrick surname.
Without Mike’s support, encouragement and extraordinary dedication to finding the actual history of the Ó Maol Phádraig family, this work would never have reached the point it has today. He was willing to keep looking when the easy answer would have been to accept the old story. More importantly, he understood that DNA by itself was not enough. If these were really a different paternal family, there should be history around them. We had to find the people.
Gradually, we did.
The Ó Maol Phádraig surname was not an occasional clerical corruption of Mac Giolla Phádraig. It had its own history. It appeared in authoritative genealogies. It appeared independently in historical records. It had strong associations with Bréifne and a second important presence in Cork. It survived well into the early modern period and, in the north, it belonged to the exact geographical world in which the supposedly mysterious “Cavan Fitzpatricks” later became so numerous.
Once we stopped trying to force those people back into Ossory, the records began making much more sense.
The Cavan Fitzpatricks were not a lost northern branch of the famous Mac Giolla Phádraig story.
They were the descendants of Ó Maol Phádraig.
And the Ó Maol Phádraig had a story of their own.
A family that had been there all along
The deeper we have gone into that story, the more remarkable it has become.
The family belongs to a much older northern and northwestern Irish world. Behind the surname lies the name Máel Pátraic, a name formed from devotion to Patrick and heavily associated in the early records with the Christian culture that developed across Ireland after the conversion period. The genealogical tradition eventually gives us Máel Pátraic son of Maolgeann, from whom the Uí Mhaol Phádraig were said to descend, and places the family within the Cenél Luacháin tradition of Bréifne.
That led us into a landscape filled with old Patrician churches, hereditary church lands and families such as Ó Maolmochéirghe and Ó Maolchonaire. It led us back toward Drumlease and the extraordinary early descriptions of a Christian society in which church, local rulers, land and kinship were intertwined. It brought us into the world of erenachs and coarbs, learned families, physicians, clerics and hereditary obligations.
I no longer think the Ó Maol Phádraig story can be reduced to a neat little territorial clan with one castle and one patch of land coloured on a map. The evidence we have uncovered points toward something more interesting: a family deeply integrated into the church, kinship and service networks of medieval Gaelic Ireland and capable of functioning across different lordships and regions.
They adapted.
That may be the defining characteristic of the family we have uncovered.
They survived changes within the medieval Irish Church. They survived political changes in Bréifne. They became connected with the great Ó Raghallaigh world of eastern Bréifne and appear among Sheridan, Brady, Mac Diarmada, Mac Mathghamhna and other families that recur throughout the records. We find them among farmers, soldiers, yeomen, retainers and men attached to important households. We find them moving with patrons and military leaders. We find them hundreds of miles away in Cork within another network of powerful Gaelic families.
The Fiants and pardons have finally allowed us to see them not simply as a surname, but as people.
One of them is a husbandman.
Another is a soldier.
Others appear among the followers of Gaelic lords.
Several turn up at Abbeylara with Richard Tyrrell after years of war.
Another group remains within the Ó Raghallaigh landscape.
And in 1602, at almost the very end of the old order, we finally meet Conchobhar Ó Maol Phádraig, Chief of His Name.
That record alone should have ended the old assumption that the northern Fitzpatricks were simply displaced Mac Giolla Phádraig from Ossory.
There was an Ó Maol Phádraig family in Bréifne substantial enough to have its own recognised chief.
It had been there all along.
The reputation that emerges from the records
Something else has surprised me during this research. The Ó Maol Phádraig repeatedly appear in very good company.
That does not mean they were wealthy magnates or great territorial rulers. The records do not support turning them into something they were not. But they continually appear among families and individuals whose trust and loyalty mattered: Ó Raghallaigh, Mac Mathghamhna, Mac Diarmada, Tyrrell and others whose households and military followings depended upon dependable people.
They seem to have been useful men.
Farmers who could work land. Soldiers who could be relied upon. Horsemen and retainers. Men who could move with a patron when circumstances changed. Men who remained within interconnected family networks generation after generation.
When Tyrrell’s world moved, Ó Maol Phádraig men moved with it.
When the Ó Raghallaigh appear, Ó Maol Phádraig men repeatedly appear around them.
When we follow those same networks across decades, familiar families keep returning.
It gives the impression of a deeply rooted family whose reputation was based less upon spectacular political power than upon reliability, service and relationships. They belonged to the machinery that made Gaelic society work.
Family seems to have been at the centre of it.
And then that entire system was attacked.
1541: the warning of what was coming
There is a terrible irony in the Fitzpatrick surname itself.
In 1541 the Mac Giolla Phádraig rulers of Upper Ossory entered Henry VIII’s policy of surrender and regrant. One of the conditions recorded in the State Papers was that they were to “utterly forsake and refuse the name of MacGilpatricke” and adopt Fitzpatrick.
Think about that sentence for a moment.
A government was telling an Irish family that acceptance into its new political system required surrendering the name by which the family had identified itself.
This was not yet the destruction that would descend upon Ulster in the following century, but the mechanism was already visible.
Submit to the Crown.
Surrender the old title.
Accept a new title from the king.
Replace Gaelic succession with English inheritance.
Convert communal and hereditary relationships with land into forms recognised by English law.
Take an English or anglicised political identity.
And, in this extraordinary Fitzpatrick example, abandon the Gaelic family name itself.
The Crown did not merely want obedience. It wanted transformation.
The old Ireland had to become something else.
For the Mac Giolla Phádraig of Ossory, one result was the Fitzpatrick name.
For the Ó Maol Phádraig of Bréifne, the eventual result was even more complete. Their original surname would almost disappear from Ireland.
And once both families became Fitzpatrick, their separate histories could disappear with it.
Centuries later a historian could look at a Fitzpatrick in Cavan and assume that he must have descended from the Fitzpatricks of Ossory. The old northern name was gone, the political world that had preserved its identity was gone, and eventually even the memory that these had once been different Gaelic families was gone.
That is how completely a people can be removed from their own history without physically removing every descendant.
By 1610 the old world was becoming unrecognisable
The change did not happen in one moment. This is important.
The Crown dismantled Gaelic Ireland piece by piece.
Surrender and regrant attacked the political and legal foundations of Gaelic lordship. English law replaced Gaelic law. Primogeniture challenged older systems of succession. Chiefs who had exercised authority through kinship were turned into Crown landholders. Families who had held land within one set of hereditary relationships could find those relationships meaningless under the new legal system. Crown officials deliberately investigated church lands and hereditary ecclesiastical holdings because those lands represented both wealth and independent Gaelic power.
Then came war.
Rebellion and resistance produced forfeiture.
Forfeiture produced grants.
Grants produced settlers.
And after the Nine Years’ War and the collapse of the great northern lordships, the opportunity came to reorganise Ulster on an enormous scale.
The Plantation was not merely a few English and Scottish families buying farms in Ireland. Native land was appropriated, surveyed and divided into new estates. In Fermanagh, for example, the majority of the redistributed land went to English and Scottish undertakers and Crown servitors, while only a minority remained in the hands of native Irish chiefs and family groups.
Cavan underwent the same fundamental transformation. When we meet Ó Maol Phádraig again after Plantation, something extraordinary has happened.
Before it, they appear among Gaelic lords and chiefs, moving within the Ó Raghallaigh political world and still possessing a man described as Chief of His Name.
After it, Ó Maol Phádraig men appear as tenants of the new undertakers.
The family had not moved.
The land had changed ownership around them.
The people were still standing there.
Their political world was gone.
This is where I have difficulty using polite language
Historians can argue about terminology, and they should. The modern legal definition of genocide belongs to a much later period, and applying twentieth-century terminology retrospectively always requires care.
But there is another danger: using so much careful language that we cease to describe what actually happened.
What followed in Ireland was not simply political modernisation. It was not the inevitable replacement of an inefficient medieval system by a better one. It was certainly not just unfortunate friction between two cultures.
There was a sustained attempt to destroy the institutions through which Gaelic Irish society maintained itself.
Its political leadership was attacked.
Its landholding system was dismantled.
Its laws were suppressed.
Its hereditary learned culture was deprived of the patronage that sustained it.
Its language was excluded from government and advancement.
Its traditional customs were repeatedly denounced as barbarous.
Its Catholic religion was persecuted and eventually subjected to an elaborate structure of legal disabilities.
Its land was repeatedly confiscated after rebellion and war.
Its population experienced killing, transportation, displacement, famine and mass emigration on a scale that would shape Ireland for centuries.
That is why I am comfortable describing what followed as cultural genocide.
Not because one word can explain three hundred complicated years of Irish history. It cannot.
But because the destruction of Irish cultural identity was not incidental to the process. Changing the people was part of the process.
Their law had to change.
Their political loyalties had to change.
Their system of land ownership had to change.
Their religion was expected to change.
Their language had to retreat.
Their names could even be ordered to change.
The Fitzpatrick surname itself provides us with a remarkable example of how that worked.
One Gaelic family was ordered to abandon Mac Giolla Phádraig and become Fitzpatrick.
Another Gaelic family, Ó Maol Phádraig, eventually disappeared beneath the same anglicised surname.
Four hundred years later, their descendants were told that they were all one family.
The Crown had not merely changed the records.
It had changed how we remembered ourselves.
The history after this point is going to be difficult
By about 1610, the family we have been reconstructing had entered a different world from the one in which it had developed.
The Ó Maol Phádraig survived.
That is important.
They did not simply disappear when the Plantation began. We find them afterward. We find them as tenants. We find large numbers of them in the terrible records surrounding 1641. Their descendants continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and eventually carried surnames such as Fitzpatrick.
But the framework surrounding them had been ripped apart.
From here the story leads into 1641, the Confederate Wars, Cromwell, further confiscations and transplantation, the Williamite settlement and the Penal era. It leads into the long decline of the Irish language, the destruction of native Catholic landownership, poverty, emigration and eventually the catastrophe of the nineteenth century.
Millions of Irish people would die over the following centuries and millions more would leave the country. No responsible history can pretend that every death, famine, war and migration had one simple cause. But neither should anyone pretend that three centuries of confiscation, legal discrimination, religious persecution and colonial landholding had nothing to do with the Ireland that eventually emerged.
Those arguments can come later.
We are going to work through that history as carefully as we have worked through everything else.
Record by record.
Family by family.
Place by place.
And if what we find makes people angry, perhaps it should.
People sometimes become uncomfortable when descendants of the native Irish speak angrily about this history. I have little patience for the idea that anger itself is somehow historically improper. Nobody needs to hate people living today because of what happened centuries ago, and that is not what this project is about. But neither are we required to sanitise the experience of our ancestors so that their history is easier to read.
Read what was done.
Read the surrender agreements.
Read the Plantation grants.
Read the confiscations.
Read the laws against Catholic property ownership, clergy and education.
Read what government officials wrote about Irish language, clothing and customs.
Read how hereditary landholders became tenants.
Read how entire political and cultural institutions disappeared.
Then decide whether anger is unreasonable.
Fifteen years later
When I ordered that little 25-marker DNA test in 2011, I had no idea where it would lead.
I certainly did not expect that a strange DNA result in a group called the Nine of Clads would eventually lead me backward through the history of Bréifne, through the Ó Raghallaigh, Ó Maolmochéirghe, Ó Maolchonaire, Mac Diarmada, Sheridan, Brady, Mac Mathghamhna and Tyrrell worlds, through papal records, genealogies, manuscripts, Fiants, pardons and patents, and finally to a family whose name had been almost completely removed from Irish memory.
But here they are.
Ó Maol Phádraig.
Not displaced Mac Giolla Phádraig from Ossory.
Not a footnote to somebody else’s clan history.
Not the Fitzpatricks who simply “went to Connacht.”
A family with its own origins, its own relationships, its own geography and its own history.
A family whose roots reached deeply into the religious and cultural landscape of medieval Ireland. A family sufficiently established to possess a recognised Chief of His Name at the beginning of the seventeenth century. A family that appears repeatedly beside people who trusted them, employed them, fought beside them and depended upon them. A family that adapted again and again while remaining connected across generations.
Then the world that had sustained them was dismantled.
Their descendants survived.
Their name almost did not.
Finding that name again has been the purpose of this research.
Understanding what happened to the people who carried it is what comes next.
References
Fitzpatrick, Ian and Mike Fitzpatrick. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the Name, the People, and the Clans. Part I.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 4, 2023.
Fitzpatrick, Mike and Proinsias Mag Fhionnghaile. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the Name, the People, and the Clans. Part II.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 5, 2024.
Fitzpatrick, Matthew and Mike Fitzpatrick. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the Name, the People, and the Clans. Part III.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 6, 2025.
Fitzpatrick, Mike. “The Mac Giolla Phádraig Laighean.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 6, 2025.
Farrell, Gerard. The ‘Mere Irish’ and the Colonisation of Ulster, 1570–1641. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Farrell, Gerard. “Class Divisions and the ‘Mere Irish’ of Colonial Ulster.” Journal of Postgraduate Research, Trinity College Dublin, 2014.
Ó Scea, Ciaran. “Erenachs, Erenachships and Church Landholding in Gaelic Fermanagh, 1270–1609.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 112C, 2011.
Parkinson, Eóin W. and Eileen M. Murphy. “Memorialisation, Settlement and Identity in Post-Plantation Ulster: Ardess Old Graveyard, County Fermanagh.” Familia 33, 2017.