Clarke

The Ó Cléirigh of Donegal were the foremost learned family of late medieval Gaelic Ireland — the Donegal Annals, the Annals of the Four Masters, the Book of Genealogies, the Calendar of Saints. Mícheál Ó Cléirigh (c.1590–1643) trained as a Franciscan in Louvain and returned to Ireland in 1626 with the explicit project of saving the historical record before the Plantation reduced the bardic schools to nothing. He travelled the country reading and copying surviving manuscripts; the Four Masters annals (compiled with Cú Choigcríche Ó Cléirigh, Cú Choigcríche Ó Duibhgheannáin and Fearfeasa Ó Maoil Chonaire at Bundrowes 1632–36) is the synthesis of that work and the foundational chronicle of Gaelic Irish history.

Tom Clarke (1858–1916) — Tipperary-born Fenian, Irish Republican Brotherhood leader, signatory of the 1916 Proclamation — is the family's defining political figure. He was the senior IRB man in Dublin throughout the planning of the Easter Rising, the first signatory of the Proclamation, and was among the first leaders executed at Kilmainham on 3 May 1916. His widow Kathleen Clarke (née Daly), daughter of the Limerick Fenian John Daly, became the second female lord mayor of Dublin in 1939 and a Fianna Fáil senator. Harry Clarke (1889–1931), no relation, was the great Dublin stained-glass artist of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement.