Carrigan, William (1860–1924), catholic priest and historian, was born at Rothestown House, Muckalee (Ballyfoyle), Co. Kilkenny, probably in August 1860, the youngest of thirteen children of James Carrigan, a substantial farmer, and his wife Johana Brenan. Educated at St Kieran's College, Kilkenny (the Ossory diocesan school), and at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, he was ordained (February 1884) by his bishop, Patrick Francis Moran (qv), then taught classics at St Kieran's (1884–6) before serving as a curate in the Ossory diocese (which corresponds roughly to the county of Kilkenny) in the parishes of Ballyragget (1886–91), Conahy (1891–3), Templeorum (1893–5), Rathdowney (1893–7), and Durrow (1897–1909). At Durrow (Queen's County) he was promoted to parish priest (1909).
While still at Maynooth Carrigan developed an interest in antiquities, which was enhanced by his stay at Kilkenny (a well-preserved medieval town with two historical societies) and furthered by his residence in rural parishes where he took every opportunity to inspect remains, transcribe gravestones and documents, and listen to the lore of old residents. His bishop, Moran's successor, Abraham Brownrigg (qv), authorised him (1890) to compile a definitive history of Ossory. This became Carrigan's sole great object. His achievement, The history and antiquities of the diocese of Ossory (4 vols, 1905), was a work that, in the words of his biographer writing in 1927, ‘far surpasses in extent, minuteness and accuracy all other Irish diocesan histories hitherto published’ (Coleman). At Brownrigg's behest Carrigan was awarded a DD by the pope (May 1906). Proposed by two fellow priests, Nicholas Donnelly (qv) and John O'Hanlon (qv), he had already been elected a member of the RIA (16 March 1903).
Although Carrigan carried out his pastoral duties conscientiously, he was a poor preacher, did not build or restore churches, was never prominent in the catholic church, and had no interest in educational or other social matters. His travels outside the Irish midlands, to Dublin, Cork, London, and Oxford, were solely in search of manuscripts. Save for a humiliating sally into the North Kilkenny by-election campaign in 1890, he took no part in politics until the rise of Sinn Féin, whose ‘high ideals of faith and fatherland’ he found ‘so close to his own’ (Coleman). A traditionalist, he was frugal in his ways: his history was written with a dip pen in an unheated study lit by two candles. William Carrigan died at Durrow on 12 December 1924. There is a bibliography of his publications (which begin in 1883) in John Bradley's introduction to the 1981 reprint of his History. His manuscripts (many of them abstracts from documents lost in the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, 1922) are at St Kieran's College, Kilkenny.
More information on this entry is available at the National Database of Irish-language biographies (Ainm.ie).