Charles O’Conor of Belanagar (Belanagar, Co. Roscommon 1710 – Belanagar 1791) was in a historically unique position. He came from one of the few native Gaelic dynasties (erstwhile rulers of Connacht under the native clan system) not to have been proscribed or driven into exile under English rule; he was also trained in the traditional antiquarianism of bardic learning (a tradition then moving to extinction). In the course of his long life he managed to become a figure of cultural and political authority, even among English and Anglo-Irish scholars, in the post-1760 decades of Enlightenment Patriotism. As one of the very few Irish figures who could, while being a practising Catholic, claim landed gentry status, O’Conor worked for a “Catholic Comittee” to remove the civil disabilities then imposed on that religion under Ireland’s “Penal Laws”; as such, he was a forerunner of the mass agitator Daniel O’Connell, who came from a similar social background.

O’Conor’s goodwill campaign on behalf of Irish Catholics involved vindicating the country’s pre-Reformation history, at that time seen by English historians as a period of savage benightedness awaiting an English-Protestant civilizing mission. O’Conor initially made use of a ghostwriter, Ferdinando Walker, but later emerged as one of the great historical authorities on the ancient history and culture of Gaelic Ireland, and as one of the last authorities who could make use of MSS documentation in Gaelic – a fine collection of which was in the family possession of the O’Conors, dating back to their erstwhile status as Gaelic magnates. When Dr Johnson campaigned to expose of the fraudulent Ossianic claims of James Macpherson, he invoked the authority of O’Conor as the foremost living expert on Gaelic antiquity. That status was confirmed in the 1770s and 1780s, when O’Conor became known as “the venerable O’Conor”, living embodiment of the tenuous continuity between Gaelic Ireland and the antiquarian interests of Enlightenment Patriotism. O’Conor’s emphasis on the civility and high moral-cultural standards of ancient Ireland against English-colonial imputations of barbarianism, while it had been devised to aid the social and political use to which he put his historical knowledge, remained the fixed tone of Irish antiquarianism and history-writing well into the 19th century. His type – the aging sage, dignified but indigent, and maintaining the receding knowledge of an Ireland now fast disappearing – became a literary commonplace, somewhat recalling the figure of Ossian himself, the “last of his race”, through the “Prince of Inishmore” character in Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl.

His grandson and namesake Charles O’Conor, DD, is noted separately.