Lynch

The Galway Lynches dominated the city's mayoralty for three centuries — eighty-four Lynches served as mayor of Galway between 1484 and the Cromwellian dispossession of 1654, the longest single-family hold on a chartered Irish municipal office in the medieval record. Their seat was Lynch's Castle on the corner of Shop Street, a fortified merchant town-house of the late 15th century, still standing today as a working bank. The Galway Lynches were principal traders with Spain and the Spanish Netherlands and supplied the city with a sustained line of merchants, scholars, churchmen and soldiers across two and a half centuries.

Eliza Lynch (1833–1886), the Cork-born Madame Lynch, was the consort of Francisco Solano López, dictator of Paraguay through the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), and the most controversial Irish émigrée of the nineteenth century. Jack Lynch (1917–1999), Cork hurler-turned-Taoiseach, served as the Republic's prime minister 1966–1973 and 1977–1979. Patricia Lynch the children's writer, William Lynch the American film director, Loretta Lynch the U.S. Attorney General — all from the broad Galway-and-Cork Lynch surname pool.