O'Daly, Daniel (Dominic; Domingos do Rosario) (1595–1662), Dominican priest, diplomat, and historian, was born in Kilsarkan near Castleisland, Co. Kerry. He came from a family of poets, the Ó Dálaigh; his grandfather, Maoilseachlainn na Scoile, his uncle Cuchonnacht, and his father, Conchubhar na Scoile, kept a bardic school near Kilsarkan, and were accomplished poets. Daniel O'Daly's mother was an O'Keeffe from the Duhallow barony in north Cork. He had a brother, Denis, who enlisted in the Spanish army and eventually settled in Portugal. The O'Dalys of Kilsarkan lost their extensive property in the Munster plantation, being identified in the inquisition of 1584 as supporters of Gerald Fitzgerald (qv), earl of Desmond, in his rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I.
Daniel joined the Dominican order at a young age and was affiliated to the Tralee friars. Because of religious persecution in Ireland, he received his education in Europe. He took his religious vows in Lugo in the province of Galicia, assuming the name ‘Dominic’; in Portuguese, ‘Frei Domingos do Rosario’, under which title he most often appeared in European diplomacy. From Lugo he matriculated for the University of Burgos, where he studied philosophy and theology. He was ordained a priest and was sent to the Dominican faculty of theology in Bordeaux, France.
On receiving his doctorate he returned to the Emly diocese on the borders of Co. Limerick and Co. Tipperary as a ‘fugitive’ priest with no fixed abode. The need to establish a seminary was O'Daly's major concern during his brief ministry in Emly. He also revisited the Castleisland region where he had grown up, and he recruited some outstanding Kerry men to the Dominican order, notably Thaddeus Moriarty (qv) and his brother, and Thomas Quirke.
O'Daly's prior-provincial, Fr Ross MacGeoghegan (qv), recalled him from Munster to Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands, where the Irish Dominican province was endeavouring to found a college for the Irish nation. O'Daly was appointed to the chair of theology and became rector of the small Dominican house in Mont-César, Louvain. The project suffered from lack of patronage and endowments. Its fortunes over a span of thirty years give a clear picture of the hardships encountered in establishing an Irish college in Europe (Flynn, 212–17, 223, 244, 297).
In 1629 O'Daly travelled to Madrid, representing the master-general of the Dominican order, Nicholas Ridolfi. While in Madrid he obtained the consent of King Philip IV to establish a college for Irish Dominicans in Lisbon with the assurance of financial stability. The founding of Corpo Santo, first as a hospice for the clerics returning to Ireland, and subsequently as a seminary and college for Irish Dominican students, was central to O'Daly's aspirations. He was further inspired to found in Belém, near Lisbon, a convent for Irish women, forbidden by civil law to establish convents in Ireland. As part of the agreement with Philip IV, O'Daly went back to Munster to recruit a body of Irish soldiers for Spanish service. This arrangement earned for the convent the reputation that it was ‘purchased with Irish blood’. A Lisbon widow, the countess of Atalya, endowed it handsomely and the convent of Bom Sucesso came into existence, 12 November 1639. It remains (2004) with its large school the oldest Irish Dominican convent.
With the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy (1640) the new queen, Luiza de Guzman, invited O'Daly to be her confessor. He won the confidence of King John of Braganza, the newly restored king, who sent him on several diplomatic missions. In 1642 O'Daly negotiated with King Charles I of England, though the exact nature of the mission remains obscure. In 1649 O'Daly was with Charles Stuart (Charles II) in exile in Jersey as one of a wider group of Irish supporters of Stuart monarchist claims. In 1650 King John IV sent him on a secret mission to Pope Innocent X concerning the nomination of Portuguese bishops directly by the Vatican, as the king of Spain was blocking the process. O'Daly continued to play an active part in the protracted dispute between the Vatican, reluctant to offend Spain, and the independent kingdom of Portugal, left without bishops for over twenty years.
In 1655 King John IV sent O'Daly as envoy to the French regent, Anne of Austria, and her chief adviser, Cardinal Mazarin, to negotiate financial and military help and, if possible, to conclude a treaty of alliance between the two countries. The following year King John appointed O'Daly as accredited ambassador to the French court. Though O'Daly lived quietly with his French brethren in the Rue Saint-Jacques, he acquitted himself of his ambassadorial duties confidently, albeit unsuccessfully. After the king's death (1656) O'Daly was recalled to Lisbon to act as chief adviser to the regent, Luiza de Guzman. He declined the title of privy councillor. After 1660 his main diplomatic triumph was his successful negotiation of a marriage alliance between the newly restored King Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza, daughter of Queen Luiza and the late king. The marriage (May 1662) reestablished the ‘ancient alliance’ between the two countries.
O'Daly refused nominations to the archbishopric of Braga and to the primatial see of Goa, but in 1662 he accepted the regent's nomination to the see of Coimbra. He died 30 June 1662 as bishop-elect of Coimbra and was buried in the church of Corpo Santo. In 1990 Corpo Santo was transferred to the Portuguese Dominican province.
O'Daly wrote two works. In 1655 he published his Latin history of the Geraldines and his account of the religious persecutions in Ireland, under the general title Initium, incrementum, et exitus familiae Geraldinorum, Desmoniae comitum, palatinorum Kyerriae in Hibernia, ac persecutionis haeriticorum descriptio. The publisher was the Officina Craesbeeckina which had previously published O'Sullivan Beare's (qv) Catholic history (1621). O'Daly's history of the Geraldines has remained an authoritative source for the origins and fortunes of the Munster Geraldines. The second work treated of the religious persecutions in Ireland during his lifetime. He listed the penal enactments of the period and presented brief biographical notes on twenty Dominican friars known to him personally who were executed on religious grounds in Ireland. The book was translated into French by Abbé Joubert (1697) and into English by the Rev. C. P. Meehan (qv) (2nd ed., Dublin, 1878).
Daniel O'Daly reflects in his life and writing the vigour and talent of the Irish counter-reformation in its formative years. Like his contemporaries, the Franciscan Luke Wadding (qv) and Francis Lavalin Nugent (qv), leader of the Capuchin mission to Ireland, O'Daly moved with ease in European circles among church figures including popes and cardinals, politicians, and heads of states. The inscription on O'Daly's tomb recorded that he was ‘In variis regum legantionibus felix . . . Vir prudentia, litteris, et Religion conspicuus: successful in embassies for kings . . . a man distinguished for prudence, knowledge, and virtue’.