Ó Gadhra (O'Gara), Fearghal (c.1597–p.1660), lord of Coolavin, patron of the Annals of the Four Masters, was the son of Tadhg, son of Oillill, lord of Coolavin, which was located in south Co. Sligo. In the late sixteenth century a number of Palesmen acquired property in the region. Among them was Sir Theobald Dillon (qv), who was awarded the wardship of Fearghal Ó Gadhra in the early seventeenth century. A provision of the wardship was that Ó Gadhra attend TCD from the ages of twelve to eighteen. This was a standard clause in wardship grants at the time, and there is no documentary proof to confirm that Ó Gadhra was enrolled as a student in the college. Inquisition evidence indicates that he was nineteen or twenty years of age in 1616, so if he was a Trinity student it is likely to have been in the years between 1609 and 1616.
Ó Gadhra benefited from the protection of his guardian, Dillon, who by the early seventeenth century had built up an influential network of connections in north Connacht. Despite the participation of Ó Gadhra's father in rebellion in 1589, Fearghal inherited most of the family estate, and in the 1630s emerged as one of the wealthiest catholic landowners in Co. Sligo, perhaps partly on account of the timber reserves on his property. He was also integrated into the catholic gentry of the region and, in 1634, served as MP for Co. Sligo. He married Isobel, the daughter of Sir John Taaffe, Viscount Corran, another prominent palesman with extensive property in the region. Taaffe was married to a daughter of Sir Theobald Dillon. Although Dillon conformed to protestantism, most of his family adhered to catholicism, as did Ó Gadhra's wife's family, the Taaffes.
The surviving evidence suggests that Ó Gadhra also remained a committed catholic throughout his life. In 1642 he was among those who welcomed the arrival of Owen Roe O'Neill (qv) to Ireland to take command of the Confederate army, in which his son John served as a captain. Ó Gadhra survived into the 1650s, but the family forfeited its estate as a result of the Commonwealth settlement, another indication that the Ó Gadhras were perceived as catholic.
The known facts of Ó Gadhra's life are few and have been carefully scrutinised by scholars to explain why this politically minor lord was chosen as the patron of the most important annalistic collection of early modern Ireland, the Annals of the Four Masters. A common explanation for Ó Gadhra's engagement with the literary project is that his attendance at TCD brought him into contact with the antiquarian scholars James Ussher (qv) and James Ware (qv), who, it is suggested, communicated their interest in collecting Irish literary and manuscript material to the young man. This is a plausible surmise but it is weakened by the lack of any evidence of Ó Gadhra's presence at Trinity. A more likely scenario is that the link between Ó Gadhra and Mícheál Ó Cléirigh (qv) originated with the family of Ó Gadhra's guardian. The Dillons had strong connections with the Franciscan order and in particular with monasteries associated with Ó Cléirigh. One of Dillon's sons, Edward (Father Louis), held the position of novice master in the Irish college at Louvain in the 1620s, when Ó Cléirigh was also there. When Ó Cléirigh came to Ireland in 1630 he spent some time in the Franciscan convent in Athlone, where another of Dillon's sons, George, was the guardian and where Theobald Dillon's wife was buried. George Dillon also wrote an approbation as an introduction to Ó Cléirigh's ‘Genealogiae regum et sanctorum Hiberniae’. In addition, two of Sir Theobald Dillon's daughters, Eleanor Dillon (qv) and Cecily Dillon (qv), were members of the Poor Clare order. Cecilia was the abbess of the Poor Clare convent in Galway for whom Mícheál Ó Cléirigh translated the rule of St Clare in October 1636, just months after he and his colleagues had completed the Annals of the Four Masters.
Apart from his personal links to Ó Cléirigh through the Dillon family, Ó Gadhra had much in common with other catholic patrons utilised by the Louvain network of scholars, such as Terence Coghlan (qv) and Brian Maguire of Tempo, Co. Fermanagh. Like them he was relatively wealthy and, at least until the crisis of the 1640s, loyal to the Stuart monarchy. His status as a respected member of the catholic gentry in the north-west would also have appealed to Ó Cléirigh and his colleagues. In return for his financial support for the annalistic compilation Ó Gadhra was presented with a copy of the manuscript, in which Ó Cléirigh penned a generous and lengthy acknowledgement of Ó Gadhra's contribution. The manuscript was inherited by Ó Gadhra's sons, Cian and John, and taken to the continent by another descendant, Oliver O'Hara, who had served in the Jacobite army in 1690–91. In the 1730s O'Hara returned the volume to Ireland, where it was entrusted to the care of Charles O'Conor (qv) of Belanagare. It was later deposited in the RIA (RIA, MS C iii 3 and H 2 ii).