Fr John McColgan

John McColgan was born in the townland of Muff near Carndonagh in the Inishowen peninsula in 1592. As a young boy he would have heard the news of the permanent garrisoning of Derry by the English, about the brutal slaying of the aged and venerated Bishop O'Gallagher in 1602, about the defeat of Kinsale, the death of Red Hugh in Spain and the surrender of Hugh O'Neill at Mellifont. Such was the political state of Ireland that the young Colgan grew up in.

He was ordained priest about 1618 and entered the Franciscan Order at St. Anthony's College Louvain in 1620. At that time in Louvain there were some notable Irishmen, two future archbishops, Hugh MacCaughwell (MacAingil) of Armagh and Thomas Fleming of Dublin. Two years later Florence Conry, founder of the college, and then Archbishop of Tuam came to live there. Hugh Burke, later bishop of Kilmacduagh was also there. Colgans future was destined to lie in the field of scholarship, and he would have more in common with other men who came to join the community at Louvain - Father Hugh Ward, Brother Michael O'Clery and Father Patrick Fleming, men who, like himself, were destined to achieve everlasting fame for their massive contribution to Irish history and hagiography.

An event took place in Paris in 1623 which was to have a profound effect on the future of Irish historical literature. Patrick Fleming on his way from Louvain to Rome and Hugh Ward on his way from Salamanca to Louvain met Father Thomas Messingham at the Irish College in Paris, he was preparing for publication Florilegium. It was the discussions between these three Irishmen on the lives of the Irish Saints that inaugurated the Louvain historical and hagiographical scheme. With this purpose in mind Brother Michael O'Cleirigh was sent back to Ireland to seek out old manuscripts and copy all the lives of the saints he could lay his hands on. He recalled - "For [he said] as you well know, my friends, evil days have come upon us and upon our country; and if this work is not done now these old books of ours that contain the history of our country - of its Kings and its warriors, its saints and its scholars - may be lost to posterity, or at least may never be brought together again; and this a great and irreparable evil would befall our native land"

The Triadis Thaumaturgae (i.e. the Triad of Miracle-Workers), needless to say are Ireland's Three Patrons, Ss. Patrick, Brigid, and Columcille. These saints were by far the most famous throughout the length and breadth of Ireland when Bishop Malachy of Down had their bodies transferred to his cathedral and had them deposited in a common shrine. Their lives and miracles had been recorded in a number of texts in either Latin or Irish. It was Colgan's intention to compile the most complete record on each of the three saints, that is to say a collection of all the relevant texts and references concerning them.

In the case of Ss. Brigid and Columcille this was realised, but in regard to Saint Patrick it was Colgan's misfortune that the oldest texts - the saint's Confessio and Epistola as well as the earliest surviving Lives - those by Tirechan and Muirchu - were out of his reach. Colgan was well aware of this deficiency and more than compensated for it. In Appendices II and IV he printed the quotations from the Confessio that are found, under the title In libro Epistolarum, in some of the lives to which he had access, along with those fragments of Tirechan and Murchu which he had found quoted in Ussher's Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates of 1639.

Colgan's most important contribution to the Triadis in his Latin version of the Irish-Latin Bethu Phatric (Vita VII), it was he who called it Vita Tripartita. He tells us that he had at his disposal three manuscripts, one belonging to the O'Clerys of Kilbarron, the other to the O'Dorans of Leinster, and a third of unknown origin.

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