Gallagher

Gallagher is the anglicised form of Ó Gallchobhair, descendant of Gallchobhar - gall, a foreigner or stranger, joined to cobhar, a helper, so 'foreign helper'. Gallchobhar mac Rorcain was a tenth-century lord reckoned the senior-most descendant of Conall Gulban, son of Niall Noígiallach, who had founded the kingdom of Tír Chonaill in the fifth century in what is now County Donegal. That descent put the Gallaghers at the head of the Cenél Conaill and made them one of the leading families not only of Donegal but of all Ulster.

Why a family would be called stranger's helper is disputed. One story, modern and therefore apocryphal, has the founding chieftain rescue the crew of the first Viking ship wrecked off Donegal, only for them to come back with a raiding party; a drier version says the ninth-century chieftain simply came to terms with the Norse. Ó Cléirigh's Glossary reads the name differently again, as gal + acobhar, 'ambition of valour'.

The sept claims to be the most senior family of the Cenél Conaill, and the proof needs stating honestly. The medieval Irish genealogies look fairly accurate back to the Middle Ages, but genetic study judges them unreliable before the seventh century. What that work does support is a real common ancestor: Gallagher Y-chromosome haplogroups trace the male line to a single medieval individual of the fifth century. The oldest paper trace of the name is a manuscript fragment in the Royal Library of Brussels, in the form 'Gallchubhair'; the Annals of the Four Masters then record the death in 1022 of Mael Cobo Úi Gallchobhar, abbot of Scrin Adamnain.

Gallagher country lay in the eastern Donegal baronies of Tír Aodha - Tirhugh, the land of Hugh - and Raphoe, the seats of its power at Ballybeit and Ballynaglack. They were chiefs of the Cenél Aedha, the descendants of Áed mac Ainmuireach, whose dúnarus or fortified residence stood at Glassbolie.

From the fourteenth century until the early seventeenth the chiefs of the sept held the rank of hereditary Marshal of the Kingdom of Tyrconnell under their kinsmen the O'Donnells, commanding the cavalry of the O'Donnell lucht tighe, the lord's standing household troops. Not a family that occasionally went to war, then, but a military caste: the horse of Tír Chonaill held in one surname for three hundred years.

They were not tame vassals. Though generally aligned with the O'Donnells, a renegade band of Gallaghers helped their lords' great rival Shane O'Neill escape after the battle of Fearsaid Suili in 1567. The arms carry the same temper - a black lion rampant treading on a serpent, between eight green trefoils - and so do the mottoes: Mea Gloria Fides, 'the faith is my glory', and in Irish, blunter, Buaidh nó Bás, 'victory or death'.

When Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1541 and head of its church, the O'Donnell lord of Tír Conaill recognised him to keep his lands, and had to defend the new religion against anyone upholding the Pope. The Gallaghers broke with their own overlords over it. The O'Donnells backed Bishop O'Kane against Edmond O'Gallagher for the see of Raphoe; O'Gallagher was never accepted, died mysteriously in 1543, and the Gallaghers seized the O'Donnell stronghold of Lifford Castle in retaliation, holding it about a year.

Rome answered by appointing another Gallagher to Raphoe, though he could not take office until Queen Mary restored Roman Catholicism as the state religion in 1553. Redmond O'Gallagher was made Bishop of Killala by Pope Paul III in 1545, appointed Bishop of Derry in 1569, and died in office on 15 March 1601. Donat O'Gallagher, a Franciscan, succeeded him at Killala in 1570, was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor in 1580, and died the next year.

The early seventeenth century destroyed the Gaelic aristocracy of Ulster. English common law replaced the chief with the sheriff and the lordship with the county, and surrender and regrant swapped Irish tanistry, the election of a chief from a group of male cousins, for succession by primogeniture. In 1607 the senior Gaelic chiefs of Ulster left Ireland.

Tadhg Ó Cianáin, who chronicled the departure, names five Gallaghers who sailed with the earls on 14 September 1607: Cathaoir mac Toimlin, Cathaoir mac Airt, Toirleach Corrach, Tuathal and Aodh Óg. They settled in Belgium and joined the O'Neill regiment of the Spanish Army of Flanders, fighting the Dutch in the Eighty Years' War. Aodh Ó Gallchobhair and his wife, nursemaid to the O'Donnell sons, travelled on to Rome. When the lordship ended, its marshals went into exile with it.

The Plantation of Ulster scattered most Gaelic Ulster names. The Gallaghers held on in Donegal in strength, and the surname is among the very few principal Gaelic names whose density today still matches its medieval heartland.

In Irish the name is still built the old way. Ó means descendant, historically Ua, of the generations of - so a man is Ó Gallchobhair or Ó Gallchóir while a woman is Ní Ghallchobhair, in newer forms Ní Ghallchóir and Ní Ghallachóir.

English record-keeping flattened that. In anglicising Gaelic names the prefixes Mac, Nic and Ó were frequently dropped outright, and where kept, Ó became O'. Most Gallagher families lost the Ó, and the spelling scattered as clerks wrote what they heard: at least thirty variants are recorded, including O'Gallagher, Gallacher, Gallaher, Galliher, Gollaher and Gallahue. A reader carrying any of those carries the same Donegal name.

Michael Gallagher was trading furs in North America by 1750; at home the name went the other way. Captain Gallagher, who died in 1818, was one of the last Irish rapparees, born at Bonniconlon in Mayo to a family originally out of Donegal. With a blunderbuss and a band of men he robbed mail coaches and landlords across eastern Mayo, Sligo and Roscommon; in one raid at Killasser he made a hated landlord eat the eviction notices drawn up for his tenants. Betrayed by a neighbour he had once helped, he was executed at Castlebar.

A century later Frank Gallagher carried the fight in print. Republican editor of the Cork Free Press, he was suppressed in 1916 for accusing the British authorities of lying about conditions for prisoners at Frongoch; in March 1921 he became deputy director of the First Dáil's Department of Publicity, producing the Irish Bulletin alongside Erskine Childers. In December 1931, by then at The Irish Press, a Free State tribunal fined him 50 pounds for seditious libel.

The name is still where it began, and everywhere else besides. Gallagher is the most common surname in County Donegal by a clear margin, common in Derry too, and fourteenth most common by birth records in Ireland - twelfth in 1890, twentieth in 1996. Yet some sixty per cent of Gallaghers are now in the Americas, fifty-five per cent in the United States, where the 2020 census ranked the name 482nd. Rory Gallagher (1948-1995), the Donegal-descended blues guitarist raised in Cork, is the best-known bearer; Liam Gallagher (b. 1972) and Noel Gallagher (b. 1967) of Oasis come of a Manchester Irish line of late nineteenth-century emigration. Every one carries a name that was once a rank in the household of the O'Donnell.