Pádraig Ó Laoghaire / Patrick (O')Leary (1870–1896)

Before he died of tuberculosis in 1896 at the young age of twenty-six, Pádraig Ó Laoghaire / Patrick (O’)Leary of Inches, Eyeries, had distinguished himself as one of Ireland’s most important Irish-language scholars. He was instrumental, for example, in founding the first rural branch of the Gaelic League in his native Eyeries in October 1894, and in the following year, he published Sgeuluidheacht Chúige Mumhan. (1.), a collection of seven folktales from Beara’s oral tradition. This book has the distinction of being the first published collection of stories of its kind to emanate from Munster. Ó Laoghaire had planned to produce two subsequent volumes but his passing meant that they would never appear in print. Even so, his book still stands the test of time today for being a rich source of information on Beara’s oral tradition in the final decades of the nineteenth century.