Cullen, Luke (1793–1859), Carmelite brother and collector of reminiscences of the rebellions of 1798 and 1803, was born at Little Bray in the parish of Cabinteely, Co. Dublin, and spent much of his youth at his grandfather's house at Glenbrien, near Gorey, Co. Wexford. At the age of 45, after a career as a seaman, he entered the Third Order of Discalced Carmelites at their monastery, Mount St Joseph, at Clondalkin, Co. Dublin (1838). These were unordained ‘religious brothers’ who, from their formation in Dublin (1807), followed a semi-monastic mode of life. As early as 1817 he interviewed survivors of the rebellions in Wexford and Wicklow. During his teaching career at Clondalkin, at the brothers’ free school for poor boys, Cullen conducted more interviews and recorded in notebooks reminiscences he had heard, some of them however not from veterans but from descendants. He read published accounts of the insurrection by Sir Richard Musgrave (qv), Edward Hay (qv) and Charles Hamilton Teeling (qv); he befriended at least one survivor, Anne Devlin (qv), and corresponded with the historian of the United Irishmen, Richard Robert Madden (qv). Cullen wrote but never published a life of Michael Dwyer (qv), the MS of which was lent by the superior of Clondalkin to William John Fitzpatrick (qv). He published (under the nom-de-plume ‘A Milesian’) only some short articles in the Catholic Telegraph (1856–9).
These were extracted by Myles V. Ronan (qv), supplemented by some extracts from Cullen's ‘Clondalkin manuscript’ (now NLI MS 8339), edited by him and published as ’98 in Wicklow (1938). Such was its success that Ronan added documents from the State Paper Office and republished it as Insurgent Wicklow (1948). Ronan's interest in Cullen continuing, he extracted and edited some Wexford matter, publishing it as Personal recollections of Wexford and Wicklow insurgents of 1798 (1959). Cullen's writings on Anne Devlin (NLI MS 9761) were edited by John Finegan (1968; rev. ed., 1992). Ruán O'Donnell's Insurgent Wicklow (1998) is an expansion of Ronan's. The extant notebooks are TCD, MS 1472; NAI, MS 5892a; NLI MS 8339, 9760–62. Luke Cullen, known as Brother Elias, died 6 January 1859 aged 66 and was buried at Mount St Joseph.