Theophilus O’Flanagan (Tulla, Co. Clare, c.1762 – Limerick 1814) was schooled in a “hedge school” where he became literate in English, Gaelic, and Latin, and was trained as a scribe (an important skill as there was little or no possibility for Gaelic to be printed) by the respected native scholar Peter O’Connell. He was accepted into Trinity College Dublin in 1784, when anti-Catholic attitudes were eroding in the climate of Enlightenment Patriotism, and gave scribal assistance to various Gaelic and Anglo-Irish scholars. By 1790 O’Flanagan was one of the most important points of contact between native literacy in Gaelic sources and Anglo-Irish antiquarian interest, assisting the likes of Charles Vallancey, Joseph Cooper Walker, and aiding Charlotte Brooke with her Reliques of Ancient Irish Poetry. A transcription and translation made by him of an ogham (Gaelic-runic) inscription, submitted to the fledgling Royal Irish Academy, came under suspicion, however, of being either extremely fanciful or even a deliberate forgery.

Following the 1798 Rebellion, research into Irish antiquity and Gaelic culture became deeply unfashionable, and O’Flanagan lost his sponsors; patronage was also withdrawn because of his irregular and intemperate lifestyle. O’Flanagan did, however, join up with other intellectuals from the Gaelic-Catholic classes to found the first literary-historical society devoted exclusively to Ireland’s Gaelic culture: the “Gaelic Society of Dublin”. Without support from wealthy patrons, it only subsisted for a few years; it does mark, however, the beginning of a succession of such societies which, from its immediate successor, Edward O’Reilly’s Iberno-Celtic Society (1817), stretches across the century to Douglas Hyde’s Gaelic League. Also, the sole volume of its Transactions (1808) contains the first serious text editions of Gaelic material, a bardic poem and the tale of Deirdre, both by O’Flanagan, and thus marks the beginning of a tradition of philological salvage and recuperation that had been abandoned by the Patriot antiquaries.

O’Flanagan, who after some years of different casual employments in various cities, died in Limerick in 1814, occupies a transitional position in many respects. He is an important mediator between native (Gaelic) lore and academic (Anglo-Irish) scholarly interest, across the political, religious, and social antagonism that divided those two constituencies; he transmitted an 18th-century antiquarian interest in Irish antiquities across the caesura of 1798 into the next century; and he started a tradition of middle-class sociability as the platform for an interest in a Gaelic tradition. O’Flanagan’s vindication of Gaelic culture as a highly civilized tradition and as the bedrock of Irish nationality was to become the accepted view in the course of the century.