O'Carolan

The Ó Cearbhalláin name is principally remembered for one man. Turlough O'Carolan (Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin, 1670–1738), born at Nobber in Meath to a Catholic farming family that moved to Roscommon when Turlough was about fourteen, lost his sight to smallpox at eighteen, and was apprenticed to the harp at the suggestion of his patroness Mrs MacDermott Roe of Alderford House, Ballyfarnan. He lived the rest of his life as an itinerant Gaelic harper-composer travelling between the houses of the Catholic and Protestant gentry of north Connacht, south Ulster and east Meath, composing about two hundred and twenty melodies for his hosts (many named for the household: Planxty Burke, Planxty Maguire, Mrs Power, Lord Inchiquin) and accompanying himself on the Irish harp.

He is the bridge figure between the older Gaelic bardic tradition (which had effectively ended with the dispossession of the Gaelic patron-houses in the seventeenth century) and the continental Italian baroque (which he had heard, by his own statement to Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, in the household of Bishop Berkeley's family at Dysart in the 1720s, and which he incorporated into his composition through the Corelli and Vivaldi-Geminiani idioms of the period). His airs have been continuously played in Irish traditional music for the three centuries since his death; he is the only individually-named composer of Irish-traditional repertoire whose tunes have remained in continuous use without interruption.

He died at Alderford House, the home of his patroness Mary MacDermott Roe, on the twenty-fifth of March 1738, sixty-seven years old. The funeral was a wake of four days attended by sixty pipers and harpers and was the model for the great gathering of Irish musicians of the eighteenth century.