Ó Fergusa, Cormac

Ó Fergusa, Cormac (fl. 1571–2), Dominican prior provincial of Ireland and continental envoy, bore the name of an ecclesiastical family of Co. Leitrim, as well as that of a family of medical practitioners in west Connacht, who were the hereditary physicians of the O'Malleys. The details of his birth are unknown. In 1571 Ó Fergusa was captured by Miler Magrath (qv), Queen Elizabeth's archbishop of Cashel, together with Richard Roche OP, and was charged with ‘preaching against the queen's proceedings’. On 14 July the archbishop interrogated Ó Fergusa, who signed a statement in Latin, which reveals valuable biographical details of this otherwise unknown Dominican; it was forwarded to the lord deputy and council in Dublin. Ó Fergusa stated that he sailed in 1567 from Galway and landed at Lisbon. From there he travelled to Rome in the company of Redmond O'Gallagher (qv), bishop of Killala, then of Derry, and remained in Rome for nine months. He petitioned for a rescript confirming the rights and privileges of his order and was chosen by the master general, Vincent Justiniani, as Irish provincial. (The Council of Trent had so stressed the authority of bishops that in September 1567 the Dominican pope, Pius V, was constrained to issue a bull safeguarding the exempt status of religious orders.) He petitioned only for certain faculties for dispensation of degrees of kindred, forbidden by canon law. These documents he left in the safe keeping of Nicholas Kirwan, a Galway merchant living in Lisbon, who reputedly was lost in a shipwreck. Ó Fergusa brought back to Ireland a letter confirming the privileges of the Rosary (this document was probably Inter desiderabilia, 29 June 1569, which perhaps provided the earliest evidence for the preaching of this devotion in Ireland) and the papal bull proclaiming the coming jubilee year (probably 1575). These he left at Ballintemple, Co. Tipperary, while he also left some books and altar furnishings at Templemichael, near Youghal.

When questioned about the stirrings in France and Spain of war against the English queen, Ó Fergusa replied that some ships in both kingdoms were ready to sail for Ireland. He implicated the Cistercian monk Maurice Fitzgibbon, catholic archbishop of Cashel (1567–78), personal representative of James fitz Maurice FitzGerald (qv) to Philip II of Spain and the people of La Rochelle, as being deeply involved in promoting preparations for the dispatch of ships to Ireland. This plan was eventually to lead to the ill-fated landing of fitz Maurice at Dingle with limited Spanish aid in 1579. How deeply Ó Fergusa was connected with these schemes cannot be accurately established. It has been claimed that he urged harbour-keepers in France and Spain to facilitate the arrival and passage of Irish refugees. This might help to explain why he took at least four years to complete his business abroad. It might also cast light on his visits to Cork, Youghal, Waterford, Clonmel, Fethard, and Cashel, and later travels to Sligo via Limerick and Galway: most of these places were ports, robustly catholic, and all were Dominican centres, having strong ties with continental Europe. It would appear that Ó Fergusa is identifiable with the friar mentioned by Walter French, merchant of Galway, in a somewhat garbled statement made at Kinsale in 1571. Ó Fergusa appeared to speak very freely about the projected Desmond invasion, but he was simply retailing information already well known to English intelligence. When asked his opinion on papal authority in England and Ireland, he said he would reply on the eighth day. On the sixth day of the friars’ captivity, Macgrath received an unambiguous message from fitz Maurice, based in the Glen of Aherlow, threatening to hang the archbishop and burn his property unless he freed ‘the poor friars’. On the eighth day while the archbishop was conveniently absent from his house, Edward Butler, his retainer, released the friars.

By the autumn of 1572 Ó Fergusa had reappeared in Sligo and published an indulgence from Rome. Silence then descends on his career. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was the unidentified friar who was arrested as he was about to depart from the Shannon estuary for Portugal with letters, blanks, and seals of several Munster religious houses, and who was hanged in his habit at Limerick early in 1578. Cormac Ó Fergusa is representative of the numerous catholic reformation clergy, religious and diocesan, who saw Spanish political intervention as an acceptable means of providing the conditions for reinvigorating Irish catholicism.