Fitzpatrick
also Mac Giolla Phádraig, Kilpatrick
The only Mac to become a Fitz — kings of Osraighe, by Tudor grant.
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The seat of Fitzpatrick
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Current mission
No mission proclaimed. The chief, once seated, sets the clan’s public focus — a campaign, a contest, a piece of restoration, a year of remembrance.
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Stake your name →What does the Fitzpatrick name mean?
Uniquely among Irish surnames, Fitzpatrick is a Gaelic Mac translated into the Norman Fitz form. The original is Mac Giolla Phádraig — son of the devotee of Patrick — a 10th-century Gaelic surname of the kings of Osraighe (Ossory), the kingdom that occupied modern Kilkenny and Laois. In 1537, Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig submitted to Henry VIII under the policy of surrender-and-regrant and was raised to the peerage as Baron of Upper Ossory. He took the new English-style surname Fitzpatrick — translating the Gaelic Mac as the Norman Fitz — in the same act. Every other Irish Fitz- surname (Fitzgerald, Fitzgibbon, Fitzmaurice) is genuinely Norman in origin; Fitzpatrick alone is a Gaelic surname in Norman dress.
The history of Fitzpatrick
The Mac Giolla Phádraig kings of Osraighe ruled the country between the Slieve Bloom mountains and the Suir from the 9th century to the 16th. Their seat was at Aghaboe in modern Laois, the monastery founded by Saint Cainnech around 577. Through the Norman period the Mac Giolla Phádraig negotiated successfully with the surrounding earls of Ormond (Butler) and Kildare (FitzGerald), kept their kingdom intact, and emerged into the Tudor period as the senior surviving Gaelic dynasty in the south Leinster Pale.
Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig's submission of 1537 was the first successful Tudor surrender-and-regrant in Ireland — a model the Crown attempted, with mixed success, on most of the other Gaelic chiefs across the next forty years. The Fitzpatrick line continued as Anglo-Irish nobility through the 17th and 18th centuries; the title fell into abeyance in the 19th. Modern Fitzpatricks include Edmund Fitzpatrick (1875–1950) of the Tasmanian Constitutional Convention, Joseph Fitzpatrick the American jazz historian, and the Irish-American singer-songwriter Fitzpatrick of the 1970s.
Notable bearers of the Fitzpatrick name
- Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig (d. 1575) — first Baron of Upper Ossory, 1537 surrender-and-regrant
- Sean Fitzpatrick (b. 1963) — All Black rugby captain
- Patrick Fitzpatrick — many bearers in 19th-century Catholic American clergy and politics