Page 64 - my-people-abbie-harris-beck

Hello O'Dochyartaighs!

Cahir Rua, who gained considerable notoriety in his short span of years, will be discussed
here.
(Cahir Rua: Ka-her Rowe)

Three hundred eighty years has not diminished this youth's reputation. He is revered,
ridiculed, loved, scorned and still questioned. What sort of man was he ? A victim of
History ? Of the disintegrating Celtic World ? Of an english play ? Or of his own
weakness ?

His father, John, died from battle wounds in 1601, impelling this boy, at 14, into a
chieftainship, with encroaching english to the East, and intruding O'Neills and O' Donnells
to the South and West. Cahir O'Daugherty walked this tightrope in the strange company
of kin , near kin and foreign power. The McDaids, the O' Doghertys, the McCaffertys
died for him and were forced into slavery due to him. The ODonnells who fostered him
also played a hand in the final, fateful years of Cahir Rua.

We now see him as a chieftain at 14, famous in battle at 15, knighted by a foreign
power(the english) at 18, and married at 19. Having been grossly insulted by an
englishman, we know that his Clann, the powerful O'Dohertys, and his kin, the loyal
McDaids, entered into open rebellion against the english. A destroyed Derry, a ravaged
Tyrone, a looted Donegal caused the foreign power to send 4,000 soldiers into Ulster.
The end came in the summer of 1608 for Cahir, for the McDaids, and for the Clann
Fiamhain.

Cahir Rua, "Charles the Red", was shot, decapitated, then quartered at the age of 21. His
head was kept on display on a pike for hundreds of years in Dublin City. This further
embittered his Clann and the Irish.

After the death of Cahir Rua, the word English was not capitalized.

(copied from the O'Dochyartaighs 1995 newspaper)

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