Ciaran of Clonmacnoise

The record of Ciaran is early and comparatively rich for an Irish saint of the sixth century: the Irish annals record his death; the Martyrology of Óengus (c. 800) devotes its September 9 quatrain to him, and its scholia carry traditions of his parentage and youth; and a dossier of later Latin and Irish Lives transmits the fuller legend. What follows keeps to what those witnesses and the modern jurisdictional accounts state.

He was born about 512 and raised in Connacht. The scholiast on the Martyrology of Óengus names his father as "Beóán the Wright, of Latharna Molt of Dál Araidi" — an Ulster family settled in Connacht — and his mother as Darerca, quoting a verse placed in the saint's own mouth: "Darerca my mother, she was not a bad woman; Beóán the wright my father, of Latharna Molt." From his father's trade comes the byname mac in tSaír, "son of the wright" (the OCA account renders it "a builder of chariots"), which the annals and martyrologies use as if a surname. The OCA adds that he was one of eight children, of whom at least two others embraced the religious life.

As a youth he went to study under Finnian of Clonard, the "tutor of Erin's saints," and is counted among the Twelve Apostles of Ireland who were formed there. The Óengus scholia tell how his father, asked for something to pay for his learning, bade him take whatever beast followed him from the herds: a dun cow followed him to Clonard, and "Ciarán's Dun" — whose milk, the scholiast says, yielded a measure for each of the twelve apostles of Ireland — became famous in the tradition; the same scholia preserve the story that Colum Cille sought out Ciaran for the gospel-book he was copying at Clonard. The OCA account records that he afterwards trained at the island monastery of Enda of Aran, and spent time with Senan on Scattery Island; that he founded a monastery by Lough Ree on the upper Shannon, opposite Hare Island, leaving his brother Donnan to succeed him there; and that he had a special affinity for animals, keeping even a fox as a pet.

About 544–548 he came south down the Shannon with a small band of companions — nine, in the account carried by the OCA — and founded Clonmacnoise (Cluain moccu Nóis) on the esker overlooking the river's east bank, serving as its first abbot. Orthodox England's list records that he gave his monks an ascetic rule known as the "Law of Kieran." Within about seven months of the foundation he fell ill and died — of the great plague of those years, according to the tradition digested in the modern literature — in his thirty-third year. The Irish annals record his death; the chronicles vary between 543 and 549, with 549 the commonly cited date, while the OCA gives approximately 545 and Orthodox England "c. 556 (?)".

Clonmacnoise itself became his enduring monument: the OCA account notes that the monastic city grew to hold a cathedral, seven other churches, three high crosses and two round-tower stumps, that some fifty kings — of Connacht, of Tara — were buried there, and that the saint's crozier survives. The house remained one of the great centres of Irish learning and art until its destruction in the sixteenth century. Ciaran's early and universal veneration in Ireland is attested by the Martyrology of Óengus, whose quatrain for September 9 reads, in Whitley Stokes's translation: "Great the festival that filleth countries, that shaketh swift ships, (the festival) of the Wright's son beyond kings, the fair feast of Cíarán of Clúain."