Families of County Cork
The largest county, the Mac Cárthaigh kingdom of Desmond, the rebel city, and the Munster Plantation.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families of County Cork
- McCarthyOf Desmond and Cashel, the line of the Eóganachta.
- O'SullivanThe third most common Irish surname, and the family of Donal Cam's march.
- CollinsThe man who beat the Empire, and the family of west Cork.
- O'CallaghanEóganacht Cashel, kings of Munster, Anglicised as Callaghan.
- MahonySons of the bear, lords of the Mizen Head.
- HealyThe ingenious one, Donoughmore in mid-Cork.
Historic ties to Cork
Families with historic but not core ground in this county.
Champions of County Cork
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in County Cork.
- Michael CollinsThe west Cork revolutionary whose intelligence war broke the British administration in Ireland and whose negotiation won the Irish Free State.
- J. G. FarrellThe Anglo-Irish novelist who wrote Troubles, the Booker-winning The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip, the Empire trilogy on the slow decline of empire that stands among the most significant English-language fiction of the later twentieth century.
- Edel QuinnThe Cork bank-cashier's daughter who entered the Legion of Mary despite a tuberculosis diagnosis that gave her months, was sent as the Legion's envoy to East and Central Africa in 1936, founded over six hundred local Legion praesidia across the region, and was declared Venerable by John Paul II.
- Robert BoyleThe fourteenth child of the Earl of Cork, born at Lismore Castle, who at Oxford in the 1660s built the air pump, formulated the gas law that bears his name, and in The Sceptical Chymist of 1661 founded modern chemistry.
- Elizabeth BowenThe Dublin-born Anglo-Irish novelist of The Last September (1929), The Death of the Heart (1938), The Heat of the Day (1949) and the great London Blitz short stories, who through the central thirty years of her career sat at the intersection of the Bloomsbury and Anglo-Irish literary worlds.
- Tim HealyThe Bantry-born barrister and parliamentarian whose forty-five-year career across the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Sinn Féin period culminated in 1922 in his appointment as the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State, the office through which the Irish state took its constitutional identity within and beyond the British Commonwealth.
- Jack LynchThe Cork hurler who took six successive All-Ireland senior medals on the Cork hurling and football fields between 1941 and 1946, served forty years as Fianna Fáil TD for Cork, and as Taoiseach 1966 to 1973 and 1977 to 1979 led the Republic of Ireland through the foundational decade of EEC membership and the Northern Ireland crisis.