Four famous Donnellys
The Donnellys lost their townland in the Plantation of Ulster. The surname did considerably better — it went to Dublin, to the Curragh, and across the Atlantic. Four who are worth knowing.
1. Patrick Donnelly, who burned the castle (1641)
Start with the shortest story.
Sir Toby Caulfeild built his mansion at Ballydonnelly between 1611 and 1619, on the site of the O'Donnelly family's own defended residence, and the village took his name instead of theirs.
In the rebellion of 1641, a man named Patrick Donnelly burned it down.
The ruin still stands in County Tyrone. It is worth seeing partly because of what it is and partly because of what happened to it.
2. Patrick Donnelly, the Bard of Armagh (1650–1716)
A different Patrick Donnelly, a generation later, and the most quietly remarkable of the four.
He was educated at a Jesuit hedge school in Drogheda — the illegal open-air schools that kept Catholic education alive when it was banned — and in 1697 was appointed Bishop of Dromore by the exiled James II.
This was the era of the Penal Laws, and a Catholic bishop in Ireland was a fugitive by definition. Donnelly's solution was theatrical: he travelled his diocese disguised as a wandering minstrel under the name Phelim Brady, carrying a harp, ministering to people who knew exactly who he was and said nothing.
The persona outlived the man. He is remembered as the Bard of Armagh, and the song of that name is still sung — a bishop who spent nineteen years as a folk musician because being a bishop would have got him killed.
3. Dan Donnelly, undefeated (1788–1820)
Ireland's first genuine sporting celebrity, and a Dublin man from Townsend Street.
On 13 December 1815 he fought the English champion George Cooper in a natural hollow on the Curragh of Kildare. Somewhere north of twenty thousand people came to watch. Donnelly knocked Cooper out in the eleventh round.
The place was renamed Donnelly's Hollow, and it still carries the name. His reach was legendary — the story told about him is that he could tie his bootlaces without stooping.
Then the strange part. After his death in 1820 his body was taken by body snatchers, and though it was recovered, his right arm was not. That arm was preserved, and it has spent the two centuries since on display in pubs and travelling exhibitions, at one point hanging in a bar in Kilcullen before being sold to a buyer in America.
An undefeated Irish champion whose punching arm became a touring relic is not a story most surnames can offer.
4. The Black Donnellys (Ontario, 1880)
The darkest one, and it should be told plainly rather than romanticised.
An Irish Catholic family who emigrated in the 1840s and farmed in Biddulph Township, north-west of London, Ontario. Years of escalating feuding with their neighbours ended on the night of 4 February 1880, when a vigilante mob attacked the family's homestead, killed five Donnellys and burned the house.
Despite two trials and a credible eyewitness, nobody was ever convicted.
The case remains one of the most notorious in Canadian history, and "the Black Donnellys" entered the language as a name for it. It is not a heroic story. It is a real one, and it is part of where the name has been.
A rebel, a bishop in disguise, a champion, and a family who were murdered for being outsiders. The shield says valour above and knowledge beneath. The people who carried the name seem to have taken both halves seriously.