O'Curry, Eugene (Eoghan Ó Comhraí), (1796-1862), scholar. Born in Dunaha near Carrigholt, Co. Clare, he was the son of a story-teller, and collector of manuscripts. After a period spent labouring and teaching in his native locality he moved to Limerick, where he was employed in the lunatic asylum in about 1828. In 1835 he was appointed to the Topographical Section of the Ordnance Survey [see George Petrie], working out of the office in Petrie's home at North Gt. Charles St., Dublin, together with his brother-in-law John O'Donovan and others such as the poet J. C. Mangan. In 1851 J. H. Todd and Charles Graves commissioned him to make a copy of the Book of Achill, a legal text, and advised the Government to establish a commission to undertake a large-scale edition of ancient Irish law. In 1853, O'Curry and John O'Donovan were appointed co-editors of the Senchas Már [see law in Gaelic Ireland]. It finally appeared after O'Curry's death in 1865. In 1854 O'Curry was appointed Professor of Irish History and Archaeology at the Catholic University [see universities], and there he delivered in 1855-6 his Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1861). Arnold based many judgements on them in his own lecture series, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866). O'Curry's Lectures supplied the earliest systematic account of such crucial issues as the manuscript sources of Irish literature and history; and the Fionn, mythological, historical, and Ulster cycles of sagas. In a second lecture series, On The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (3 vols., 1873), O'Curry proceeded to treat comprehensively of the political divisions, and kinship [see fine] system of Gaelic Ireland. O'Curry's two Irish lecture series amount to an authoritative interpretation of Gaelic society and culture.
Bibliography
Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (ed.), Eoghan Ó Comhraí: Saol agus Saothar (1995).
