Tomás Ó Con Cheanainn
Irish historian and university teacher (1921-2015)
Tomás Ó Con Cheanainn (9 March 1921 – 13 June 2015) was an Irish scholar, historian, and professor.
A native of Baile an tSagairt, Cois Fhairrge, County Galway, Ó Con Cheanainn won a scholarship in 1940 to University College Galway, studying for a BA in Irish and Classics. His MA thesis concerned a hagiographical text in the Leabhar Breac - the early 15th-century codex was later a subject of "a major palaeographical study, which marked the commencement of a virtual reinvention, wrought single-handedly in his lifetime, of scholarly knowledge concerning the culture and traditions of Connacht."
According to his obituary in The Irish Times:
"Tomás had an unrivalled knowledge of the literary and historical content of Irish manuscripts, medieval and modern. But he was also a palaeographical “natural”, possessed of a wonderfully keen eye for the salient features of a scribal hand. Long before digital imagery and databases, he showed a capacity to recall and associate such features in manuscripts from different collections, and to fix an identity previously unrecognised. He mastered the art of describing styles of handwriting with clarity and exactness, regardless of whether he was writing in English or, as he did almost exclusively in later years, in Irish."
Ó Con Cheanainn from 1969 to until he retired in 1986, was Professor of Classical and Modern Irish. From 1975 to 1986 he edited Éigse: A Journal of Irish Studies, and was a member of the Royal Irish Academy. The last of his many articles, written when age 90, concerned his dynastic ancestors, the Uí Díarmata, and the process by which its ruling sept adopted the surname Ua Con Cheanainn.
See also
Kings of Uí Díarmata
Tomás Bán Ó Conceanainn (1870 – 1946), writer and historian.
The public source identifies “Tomás Ó Con Cheanainn” as irish historian and university teacher (1921-2015). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Tomás, Cheanainn and Irish.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20647903. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 2015, 1940 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tomás Ó Con Cheanainn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.