We have now reached a point in the Ó Maol Phádraig story where the southern records become noticeably fewer and farther between. Through the later sixteenth century the name can still be followed across Cork, Kerry and Limerick, particularly in records connected with the Desmond conflicts and the Nine Years’ War. After about 1601, however, the trail becomes much harder to follow.
For much of this research that contrast created a genuine problem. The northern and southern Ó Maol Phádraig could easily be read as separate historical lineages. The northern family became concentrated, politically coherent and comparatively easy to follow. The southern population appeared across several parts of Munster and then seemed to recede from view.
I have usually approached the problem record by record: one Fiant, one pardon, one place-name, one ecclesiastical reference and one group of followers at a time. Seen that way, the southern evidence remained fragmented. Only recently, after enough of the material had accumulated, did a broader pattern begin to emerge.
The answer was not hidden in one new document. It became visible only by stepping back from the individual records and looking at the way the northern and southern populations had developed as a whole.
By the later sixteenth century they were living in very different social circumstances. The north had developed a concentrated local population with a strong political relationship to the Ó Raghallaigh. The southern families were older than the Tudor records might suggest, but they were spread through several lordships and lacked an equivalent political centre.
That difference helps explain much of what followed.
An Old Southern Presence, but Not a Southern Dynasty
The southern Ó Maol Phádraig were not late arrivals.
Robert Ó Maol Phádraig was called as a juror in Cork in 1306, showing that the surname was already sufficiently established there for a member of the family to hold recognised local standing. Later in the fourteenth century the name appears in a very different southern setting at St Michael’s Mount in the diocese of Ardfert.
By 1390 Alan Ó Maol Phádraig was prior of St Michael’s Mount, while Gilbert Ó Maol Phádraig was among the canons involved in his postulation. Around 1400, after Alan’s death, another Ó Maol Phádraig, Gillasenayn, appears during proceedings concerning the succession to the priory. These records place Ó Maol Phádraig within an important ecclesiastical institution in Kerry more than a century and a half before the large body of Tudor material.
There was therefore a real and established southern presence.
What is much harder to find is evidence that Ó Maol Phádraig ever became one of the principal political families of Munster. The deeper history of the surname points northward, and the southern branches appear to have entered Munster as an already formed family rather than as one of the great territorial dynasties around which southern political society was organised.
That distinction would have affected how the family was perceived locally.
A MacCarthy in Cork belonged to a name whose territory, history and political standing were understood by the surrounding population. An Ó Maol Phádraig household did not necessarily possess that same regional identity. The family could be old, respected and well established without being one of the names around which Munster itself was politically organised.
The later records fit that pattern. Southern Ó Maol Phádraig appear with the Mac Donagh MacCarthys of Duhallow, Barry and Condon interests, the MacCarthys of Muskerry and Carbery, the Bourkes of Limerick and the Fitzmaurices of Kerry. The strongest concentration appears to have been in the Barry and Condon sphere, but beyond that the known households are widely distributed.
The Fiants reflect this position. Southern Ó Maol Phádraig most often appear in large pardons containing numerous unrelated families, frequently issued as part of broader attempts to pacify populations involved in the Desmond conflicts and the Nine Years’ War. Their presence shows that particular Ó Maol Phádraig men belonged to those political followings, but the records rarely expose a wider Ó Maol Phádraig structure behind them.
The family appears in Munster, but rarely as a political body in its own right.
A Different Development in the North
The northern branch had followed another course.
The possible movement from the Loch Cé and Cenél Luacháin world toward Lough Oughter has already been examined elsewhere in this series, including the ecclesiastical connection associated with Clarus Mac Mailín. Whether that movement occurred directly through that network or through the wider Loch Cé–Lough Oughter relationship remains theoretical. What is much clearer is the result.
By the sixteenth century the Lough Oughter–Drumlane–Annagh region had become the de facto homeland of the northern Ó Maol Phádraig.
The surviving pardons, patents and Fiants repeatedly place the family within the Ó Raghallaigh political world. Those records have already been examined in detail and do not need to be repeated here. Their collective effect is difficult to ignore. By 1602 Conchobhar Ó Maol Phádraig was described as “Chief of His Name,” and in the 1641 Depositions the family is explicitly described as a sept.
The northern records also have a different quality from much of the southern material. Ó Maol Phádraig can appear in relatively focused political groups, often close to leading Ó Raghallaigh, and several members of the family occur together in identifiable local clusters such as Dowra. By the 1640s the depositions name fathers and sons, brothers, gentlemen, yeomen, craftsmen and military leaders.
This was a family people around them recognised.
The concentration of Ó Maol Phádraig around Drumlane, Annagh, Belturbet and adjoining districts meant that neighbours encountered not one isolated household but a substantial local population. When violence erupted in 1641, witnesses could identify individual Ó Maol Phádraig men, distinguish their family relationships and recognise the wider body to which they belonged.
That local visibility is one of the clearest differences between north and south.
Identity Was Something People Had to Remember
The distinction was not only political.
Much of what people knew about their wider kindred would have been passed down orally: who their relatives were, where the family had come from, which branches belonged together and which political relationships had shaped their history. Such memory was easier to sustain when many relatives lived nearby and when the surrounding population also recognised the family as a distinct group.
The northern Ó Maol Phádraig had those conditions. A household in the Lough Oughter–Drumlane–Annagh core lived among other Ó Maol Phádraig families. The family name had a local meaning, reinforced by relatives, neighbours and the continuing relationship with the Ó Raghallaigh.
In much of the south the circumstances were different. Outside the stronger Barry and Condon concentration, Ó Maol Phádraig households were scattered through different territories. There may have been only a small number of close relatives carrying the surname nearby, leaving each generation with fewer people around it capable of reinforcing the wider family history.
The surrounding community would also have remembered the family differently. A MacCarthy household existed within a landscape saturated with MacCarthy political history and kin connections. A small Ó Maol Phádraig household in the same district would increasingly be known as part of that local community rather than as one piece of a much wider Ó Maol Phádraig population.
Over time, that could weaken the connection to the older heritage without requiring the family itself to disappear.
Loyalty Followed the Same Pattern
The difference in local identity would also have affected political and military loyalty.
Taking up arms was not simply a matter of living within a lord’s territory. Kinship, patronage, protection, inherited obligation and long-standing relationships all influenced who followed whom.
The repeated Ó Maol Phádraig–Ó Raghallaigh association in the north suggests a relationship much deeper than occasional military service. Generations of proximity had allowed political loyalty and family identity to reinforce one another.
The southern Fiants show Ó Maol Phádraig men in the followings of MacCarthy, Barry, Condon, Bourke and Fitzmaurice interests, but those relationships need not all have carried the same depth. A household might follow a MacCarthy lord because it lived within his territory, depended upon his protection or held land under his influence. When that lordship changed, the political relationship could change with it.
The northern association was different in character. The persistence of Ó Maol Phádraig alongside the Ó Raghallaigh over a long period suggests that the connection had become embedded in the social world of the family rather than arising only from immediate circumstance.
What Plantation Preserved
Both regions then underwent enormous political restructuring.
The Desmond rebellions devastated large parts of Munster before plantation began. Anthony McCormack has described severe economic disruption, depopulation and the destruction of much of the existing social order following the rebellion of 1579–1583. The Munster Plantation then confiscated extensive territories and attempted to impose a new colonial landholding structure.
The north experienced its own transformation somewhat later. The Ó Raghallaigh lordship was dismantled, land was confiscated and redistributed, new towns and estates were created, and the legal structure of landholding changed profoundly.
Neither plantation operated as cleanly as its planners intended.
D. B. Quinn showed that Munster undertakers often remained dependent upon native Irish tenants and labourers. Gerard Farrell has demonstrated a similarly complicated transformation in Ulster, where colonial landholding altered Gaelic social structures without simply removing the native population.
Native families therefore survived in both regions, but they did not all carry the same social structures into the new order.
In Cavan, many Ó Maol Phádraig remained within a relatively compact area. The old political order above them had been broken, but the families themselves still lived among relatives and among neighbours whose relationships with them predated plantation. Legal ownership could change much faster than kinship, marriage, neighbourhood or inherited loyalty.
The southern households were already more dispersed. Plantation could leave an Ó Maol Phádraig family on the land in Duhallow, another elsewhere in Cork and another in Kerry or Limerick without preserving any strong practical relationship between them.
The different outcome therefore began before plantation. Plantation inherited an already concentrated northern population and an already scattered southern one.
After the Wars
The southern Ó Maol Phádraig are most visible in records created during periods of conflict, especially the Desmond wars and the Nine Years’ War. Those conflicts generated large pardons and Fiants that named the followers of major lords and, in doing so, brought many otherwise obscure families into the record. Once those wars ended, that particular documentary window narrowed sharply.
At the same time, the political relationships that had produced those records were changing. The older world of lord, follower and dependent family was increasingly replaced by leases, tenancies and estate relationships. An Ó Maol Phádraig family could remain in the same district without continuing to appear in the kind of political records that had previously identified it.
For a southern population already dispersed through Cork, Kerry and Limerick, that change made the wider family connection increasingly difficult to see. The households themselves may have remained, but there was no longer the same political structure drawing them together in the surviving records.
The changing surname added another layer of difficulty. A northern Court of Chancery record from 1693 names “Edmund Fitzpatrick alias Mulpatrick,” showing that Fitzpatrick and the older surname could still be applied to the same person during this transitional period. As Fitzpatrick became the normal written form, scattered southern Ó Maol Phádraig households became harder to recognise as descendants of the older family.
The apparent disappearance of the southern branch can therefore be understood without requiring the families themselves to have vanished. What faded first was their visibility as a connected Ó Maol Phádraig population.
There is also a useful comparison within the northern material. Ó Maol Phádraig families farther from the main concentration become more difficult to follow in later records than those within the Lough Oughter–Drumlane–Annagh core. Their earlier identity is clear, but the continuity becomes weaker as the surrounding kin network thins.
That is perhaps the strongest indication that the real distinction was never simply north against south. It was between a family identity continually reinforced by numbers, kinship, local recognition and inherited political relationships, and one increasingly carried by smaller households living among other populations.
Seen in that light, the southern history becomes less mysterious. The people did not need to disappear for much of their wider identity to be lost. Once the local network weakened, the memory of belonging to a larger Ó Maol Phádraig population could weaken with it.
What looked for years like two separate histories may instead reflect two very different ways in which the same wider family adapted to the political and social worlds around it.
Sources and Further Reading
Fitzpatrick, Ian and Fitzpatrick, Matthew. 2023. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the Name, the People, and the Clans. Part I.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 4, 1–10.
Fitzpatrick, Matthew and Mag Fhionnghaile, Proinsias. 2024. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the Name, the People, and the Clans. Part II.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 5, 25–42.
Fitzpatrick, Matthew and Fitzpatrick, Mike. 2025. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the Name, the People, and the Clans. Part III.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 6, 27–41.
Calendar of Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Entries concerning St Michael’s Mount in the diocese of Ardfert, including Alan Ó Maol Phádraig and other Ó Maol Phádraig associated with the priory, 1389–1400.
Mills, James. 1914. Calendar of the Justiciary Rolls of Ireland Preserved in the Public Record Office of Ireland: Edward I, Part II. Dublin and London. Record of Robert Ó Maol Phádraig in Cork, 1306.
McCormack, Anthony M. 2004. “The Social and Economic Consequences of the Desmond Rebellion of 1579–83.” Irish Historical Studies 34(133), 1–15.
Quinn, D. B. 1966. “The Munster Plantation: Problems and Opportunities.” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 71.
Smith, Margaret K. “Overlords, Underlords and Landlords: Negotiating Land and Lordship in Plantation Munster.” Irish Historical Studies.
Farrell, Gerard. 2014. “Class Divisions and the ‘Mere Irish’ of Colonial Ulster.” Journal of Postgraduate Research, Trinity College Dublin.
Farrell, Gerard. The ‘Mere Irish’ and the Colonisation of Ulster, 1570–1641.
Kelly, Sam. 2021. “The Battle of Moytura and Formaoil na Fiann.” Sligo Field Club Journal 7.
Earley, J. and Boyle, J. 1999. “Conflict over the Rectory of Cinel Luachain during the Fifteenth Century.” Breifne 9(35).
Ireland Public Record Office. Reports of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records in Ireland. Relevant Elizabethan Fiants and early Stuart pardons concerning Ó Maol Phádraig in Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Cavan and neighbouring districts.
Trinity College Dublin. 1641 Depositions. Depositions concerning the Ó Maol Phádraig population of Cavan and Fermanagh.
Patent Rolls and Court of Chancery records relating to the 1693 reference to “Edmund Fitzpatrick alias Mulpatrick.”