Burke

William de Burgo was granted Connacht by King John in 1227 — a paper grant over what was at that point still a fully functioning Gaelic kingdom under the Ó Conchobhair. The de Burgos took it by force across the next two generations. Richard Mór de Burgo (d.1242) and his grandson Walter the Red Earl (1259–1326) were the great Norman warlords of the western seaboard, holding Connacht as effectively a palatinate of their own.

The de Burgo title came apart in 1333 with the murder of William Donn de Burgo, 3rd Earl of Ulster, on the road outside Belfast. The English-born direct heir was a girl, Elizabeth, who eventually married Lionel of Antwerp, son of Edward III; the title and lineage went into the English royal house. But the cousins remaining in Connacht refused to recognise the English-side inheritance, set themselves up as the Mac William Bourkes — Mac William Uachtarach in Galway, Mac William Íochtarach in Mayo — and ran the western province as Gaelicised Norman dynasts for the next two and a half centuries.

Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the Irish-born statesman and political philosopher whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is the founding text of modern conservative thought, was a Dublin-Burke of distant Mayo descent. The Mayo-Burke line of Gráinne Mhaol — Gráinne Ní Mháille, sea-queen of Iar Connacht, who married Risdeárd an Iarainn Burke around 1566 — is one of the most documented connections between the Norman-Irish world and the Gaelic. Frank Burke, the actor; Robert O'Hara Burke, the explorer who died on the 1860 Burke and Wills expedition across Australia; Solly Burke, the British boxer — all from the same broad Anglo-Norman-Irish surname pool.