Ultan of Ardbraccan

Ultán belonged to the moccu Conchobair (Dál Conchobair) and governed the church of Ard Breccáin — "Breccán's height," now Ardbraccan, near Navan in County Meath — as its abbot-bishop, in succession, the tradition of the place says, to its founder Breccán. The later merging of the see into the diocese of Meath is why the dictionaries style him "a Bishop of Meath."

The firmest fact of his record is his place in the Patrician dossier: the bishop Tírechán, writing in the later seventh century in what is now the Book of Armagh, states that he compiled his account of Patrick from the mouth, or the book, of Bishop Ultán, whose fosterling and pupil he had been. Ultán thus stands, within living memory, at the head of one of the two earliest strands of the written Patrick tradition. The tradition makes him a hagiographer in his own right: the Catholic Encyclopedia's account of Ardbraccan has him write lives of both Brigid and Patrick, and the scholiast tradition on the Félire credits him with collecting the miracles of Brigid into a single book, which his disciple Brocán Clóen turned into verse. Two hymns in Brigid's honour are transmitted under his name — the Latin "Christus in nostra insula" and the Old Irish "Brigit bé bithmaith" ("Brigid ever-good woman") — though the medieval prefaces themselves hedge the attributions among several authors. A late tradition even makes him Brigid's uncle through her mother Broicsech; it is recorded here as tradition, not fact.

What the Irish church chose to remember of him is his care of children. The Félire (Martyrology) of Óengus, c. 800, gives him the day's quatrain at September 4: "In the great sinless Kingdom, wherein little ones are blooming, greatly play his children round Ultan of Ard Breccain" (tr. Whitley Stokes). The scholia on the Félire gloss his name quasi altan, "razor," "for his keenness and sharpness in miracles and marvels," and call him "the cleric of the children": after the plague called the Buide Connaill, every babe without maintenance was brought to Ultán, so that often fifty, or a hundred and fifty, were with him at once, and he himself fed them — cutting off cows' teats and pouring milk into them, "the babes a-playing around him." The same scholia picture him travelling with his gospel-book on his back, hanging without any strap, and tell the origin of the proverb "Ultán's left hand against the evil": interrupted at the feeding of his children by a king's messengers begging his prayers against a foreign fleet, he raised against it the hand that was free — the left — and said that had it been his right, no foreigner would ever invade Ireland. His memory as protector of children has endured in Ireland into modern times: the children's hospital founded in Dublin in 1919 was named St Ultan's.

He died on September 4; the annals place his death in 657 (Annals of Ulster, which also carry a duplicate obit a few years later), with 653 (Clonmacnoise), 655 (Ware) and 656 (Four Masters) also transmitted.