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Updated: June 4, 2025
All Munster submitted to his sway; Connaught was among the first to recognise his title as Ard-Righ. Ossory and Leinster, though unwillingly, gave in their adhesion. But Meath refused to recognise him, and placed its government in commission, in the hands of Con O'Lochan, the arch-poet, and Corcran, the priest, already more than once mentioned.
Conor, the son of Donogh, who succeeded his father in the year 1242, animated by the example of his cotemporaries, made successful war against the invaders of his Province, more especially in the year 1257, and the next year; attended with O'Conor the meeting at Beleek, on the Erne, where Brian O'Neil was acknowledged, by both the Munster and the Connaught Prince, as Ard-Righ.
A third meeting was had during the summer in Meath, where were present, beside the Ard-Righ, the Prince of Aileach, Dermid of Leinster, and other chiefs and nobles. At this conference they divided Meath into east and west, between two branches of the family of Melaghlin.
It was the mensal demesne, or "board of the king's table:" it was exempt from all taxes, except those of the Ard-Righ, and its relations to the other Provinces may be vaguely compared to those of the District of Columbia to the several States of the North American Union. How the common people lived within these external divisions of power it is not so easy to describe.
It was an acknowledgment of the plain fact that the natives possessed and exercised their own laws of succession and election, their own government and autonomy. The disappearance of the Ard-Righ, who had held the titular power over the whole country, is no proof that the Irish possessed no government: for they themselves had refused for several centuries to acknowledge his power.
One line had given three, another seven, another twenty kings to Erin but who had ever heard of an Ard-Righ coming out of Connaught? 'Twas so they reasoned in those days of fierce family pride, and so they acted. He had been chief of his tribe since the year 1106, and from the first had begun to lay his far forecasting plans for the sovereignty.
The princes were sometimes also punished with death. Recraid, head of a clan, came with his Druids and with words of incantation written under his white garments; he fell dead. Laeghaire himself, the Ard-Righ of all Ireland, whose family became Christian, but who refused to abandon his superstitions, perished with his numerous attendants.
But, after all, harassed as he was with apprehensions of the future, perhaps no other Prince could have done more in a single winter in a strange country than Henry II. did for his seven months' sojourn in Ireland. The Ard-Righ Roderick, during the period of Henry the Second's stay in Ireland, had continued west of the Shannon.
The chiefs of the Northern Hy-Nial remained deaf to all his overtures, and though Fitz-Aldelm and de Lacy, the commissioners despatched to treat with Roderick, are said to have procured from the deserted Ard-Righ an act of submission, it is incredible that a document of such consequence should have been allowed to perish.
We know from the Irish annals that the dignity of Ard-Righ was always sustained by alliances with some of the provincial kings, to secure the submission of others, and we have a hint of the same nature in the passage, already quoted, from Caesar, as also taking place in Gaul.
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