Matthew O’Conor

Life
1773-1844 [occas. O’Connor]; b. Co. Sligo, br. Rev. Charles O’Conor [the Younger]; prepared for priesthood at Rome, but changed to law and qualified as a barrister; wrote History of Irish Catholics from the Settlement in 1691 (1813), based on letters of his grandfather Charles O’Conor to Dr. John Curry, which he held at his estate at Mt. Druid, and are now in the Clonalis collection, amounting to some 285 letters; also issued Military History of the Irish Nation comprising a Memoir of the Irish Brigade in the Service of France with ... Official Papers, AD 1550-1738 (1845). ODNB DIH

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Works
History of Irish Catholics from the Settlement in 1691 (Dublin: J. Stockdale 1813); Military History of the Irish Nation (Dublin 1845).

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Commentary
Maureen Wall, Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, Collected Essays, ed. Gerard O’Brien, Dublin: Geog. Publ. 1989) for quotation from History of the Irish Catholics (1813), ‘The constant degradation lowered them in their own estimation, and rendered them crouching and pusillanimous. Sorrow and dejection were stamped in their foreheads; their timid gait and cautious reserve marked their abject condition. They did not dare to look a protestant in the face, they avoided the side of the street he walked, just as the slave evades the countenance of the master’ (pp.329-30); Bibl. note, MS continuation of The history of the Irish Catholics (in the possession of the Rev. Charles O’Conor Don, SJ.).

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Quotations
History of the Irish Catholics [ ...; &c.] (1813): ‘By Dr. [John] Curry’s great exertions, a committee for the management of Catholic affairs was formed in the city; but owing to the divisions and parties among the Catholics at that time it was confined to the citizens merely.’ (p.249)

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