Murphy
also Ó Murchadha, MacMurchadha, MacMurphy
The most common surname in Ireland — three independent dynasties, all 'sea warrior'.
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Stake your name →What does the Murphy name mean?
Anglicised from two parallel Gaelic surnames — Ó Murchadha, descendant of Murchadh, and Mac Murchadha, son of Murchadh. Murchadh was a personal name meaning 'sea warrior' (muir, sea + cadh, warrior). Three distinct Murchadh families gave rise to the modern Murphys: the Uí Cheinnselaig of Wexford, the Eóganacht line in Cork and Kerry, and the Ulster Murphys of Tyrone and Armagh. Anglicised to Murphy by the 17th century; the Gaelic forms survived in Irish-speaking districts into the 19th.
The history of Murphy
Murphy is the most common surname in Ireland by a clear margin, carried by roughly fifty-five thousand people on the island and by an order of magnitude more across the diaspora. Three separate Gaelic kindreds contributed: the Wexford Mac Murchadha — descendants of Diarmait Mac Murchadha, the king of Leinster who invited Strongbow's Normans into Ireland in 1167 — give the name its highest density, and Wexford remains the densest Murphy county on the island. The Munster Ó Murchadha branch peopled Cork and Kerry; the Ulster Murphys held Tyrone and Armagh.
Diarmait Mac Murchadha (c.1110–1171) is the most consequential bearer in Irish history, and the most contested. Driven from Leinster in 1166 by the high king Ruaidrí Ó Conchobhair, he sought help from Henry II at Aquitaine and contracted with Richard de Clare ('Strongbow') for an army to retake his kingdom. The Norman landings of 1169 at Bannow Bay began the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland — an event for which Diarmait's name has been a curse word in Irish historical memory for eight centuries. Strongbow married Diarmait's daughter Aoife at Waterford in 1170; the painting of that wedding by Daniel Maclise (1854) hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland as a kind of national reckoning.
William Lawrence Murphy (1845–1919) of Bantry was the Dublin tramways magnate and proprietor of the Irish Independent whose lockout of his workers in 1913 began the Dublin Lockout — the great labour dispute that radicalised James Connolly and shaped the 1916 Rising. Audie Murphy (1925–1971), the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War and the post-war film actor, descended from a Texas-Murphy line of Irish Famine emigration. The Murphy diaspora is now the second-largest of any Irish surname, after Kelly.
Notable bearers of the Murphy name
- Diarmait Mac Murchadha (c.1110–1171) — king of Leinster who invited the Normans to Ireland
- William Martin Murphy (1845–1919) — newspaper proprietor, antagonist of the 1913 Lockout
- Audie Murphy (1925–1971) — most-decorated American WWII soldier, actor
- Cillian Murphy (b. 1976) — actor, Cork