Irish surnames starting with C

The C names in brief

• Cagney · Ó Caingne · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Caingne — from caingean, 'a legal dispute'; an advocate's name. A branch of the Corca Laoighdhe, originally seated in the parish of Myross in the barony of West Carbery, County Cork. James Cagney's people came from the county.
• Cahill · Ó Cathail · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cathal — cath, 'battle', with either 'rule' or 'great'. Cathal is battle-powerful, and Woulfe counts five separate families of the name, all of them well established by the close of the 16th century: Ó Cathail of Cinel Aodha in south-west Galway, of the same stock as the O'Shaughnessys; another in Crumthann in the east of that county; the Corca Thine family in Tipperary, who gave their name to Ballycahill; the Ó Cathail of Loch Lein, lords of that Eoghanacht country in Kerry before the O'Donoghues; and a fifth near Corofin in Clare. Five unrelated families, one spelling — which is the ordinary condition of an Irish surname rather than the exception.
• Callan · Ó Cathaláin · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cathalán, 'little battle-mighty one'. An Oriel sept of the border drumlins; Fr Nicholas Callan of Louth, professor at Maynooth, invented the induction coil in 1836 — electrifying physics from a seminary basement.
• Campbell · Mac Cathmhaoil (adopted) · Scottish (gallowglass & planter)
  Cam beul, 'crooked mouth'. Twice-arrived from Scotland: first as mail-clad gallowglass mercenaries for Gaelic lords, then as plantation settlers. Ulster's history in a single surname.
• Canavan · Ó Ceanndubháin · Gaelic learned family
  Descendant of Ceanndubhán, 'the dark-headed one'. Hereditary physicians to Muinntear Murchadha, the clan of which the O'Flahertys were chiefs — one of Ireland's medical families, whose learning passed from father to son for centuries. Woulfe records the name in Cork as well.
• Cannon · Mac Canann · Gaelic sept
  Son of Cana, 'a whelp' or wolf cub. A Tír Chonaill name from the Donegal coast, from Cano or Cana — a whelp, or a wolf. Woulfe calls it rare and scattered, and adds the detail that matters to anyone tracing it: the name is now very often disguised as MacCann, which is a different surname entirely.
• Cantwell · Cantual · Norman
  From Kentwell, Suffolk. Knights of Kilfane whose effigy (the towering 'Cantwell Fada', tallest in these islands) still stands sword-ready in a roofless Kilkenny church, the longest lie-in in Irish history.
• Carew · de Carrún · Norman-Welsh
  From Carew in Pembrokeshire — a place name, 'the fort by the ford'. A Cambro-Norman family of the first invasion, kin to the Fitzgeralds. Sir George Carew, President of Munster after Kinsale, made the name feared; it has also been used to anglicise the Gaelic Ó Corráin.
• Carey · Ó Ciardha / Ó Cearaigh · Gaelic septs (several)
  Descendant of Ciardha, 'the dark one' — among several distinct roots. One spelling covering many origins: at least nine separate Irish patronymics were anglicised as Carey, alongside unrelated English, Welsh and French families of the same name.
• Carroll · Ó Cearbhaill · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cearbhall, 'fierce in battle'. Princes of Éile from Birr's borderlands. An emigrant descendant, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, was the only Catholic signer of the American Declaration of Independence.
• Carty · Ó Cárthaigh · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cárthach, 'loving'. Woulfe records families of the name in Tipperary, Clare and Roscommon, the last of which spread into Longford, Sligo and Donegal — and three Cartys as chief poets of Connacht in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A separate name from the Munster MacCarthys, though emigrants often assumed otherwise and added the Mac back on in America.
• Casey · Ó Cathasaigh · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cathasach, 'vigilant in war'. Six septs at least, from Dublin's Fingal to Cork's Mitchelstown. Seán O'Casey put the name over the door of modern drama; engineers, boxers and bishops carried it everywhere else.
• Cassidy · Ó Caiside · Gaelic learned family
  Descendant of Caiside, 'curly-haired'. Hereditary physicians to the Maguires for three centuries — medieval Fermanagh's medical school in one family. In ballad-America the name rode with Butch Cassidy and 'Hopalong'.
• Clancy · Mac Fhlannchaidh · Gaelic learned family
  Son of Flannchadh, 'the red warrior'. Two families of the name, and both held office rather than land. The Clare family were hereditary brehons, judges under the Irish law, to the O'Briens of Thomond, which made them keepers and interpreters of a legal system older than the English one that replaced it.
• Clarke · Ó Cléirigh · Gaelic learned family
  Descendant of the cleric — possibly Europe's oldest surname (916 AD). The Ó Cléirigh may hold the world's oldest hereditary surname on record. As chief chroniclers of Gaelic Ireland they gave history its debt: Mícheál Ó Cléirigh led the Annals of the Four Masters (1632–36).
• Cody · Mac Óda · Norman
  Son of Odo. Norman 'sons of Odo' who became Kilkenny farmers and Wexford yeomen; a descendant, William 'Buffalo Bill' Cody, took the name to every arena on Earth.
• Coffey · Ó Cobhthaigh · Gaelic learned family
  Descendant of Cobhthach, 'victorious'. A brehon and poetic family of Westmeath, chief ollamhs of Uisneach — the hill at the mythic centre of Ireland, where a townland is still called Toorcoffey, Coffey's tower.
• Coleman · Ó Colmáin / Ó Clumháin · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Colmán, 'little dove' — from Latin columba. A family of the Uí Fiachrach seated at Grangemore in the parish of Templeboy, County Sligo. By the sixteenth century the name was commonest in Cork, Tipperary and Waterford.
• Colgan · Ó Colgáin · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Colga — from colg, 'sword' or 'thorn'. An old Offaly family of the same stock as the O'Connors, O'Dempseys and O'Dunnes, and common in Thomond as Culligan and Quilligan. John Colgan, the seventeenth-century Franciscan at Louvain, saved much of what we know of the Irish saints.
• Collins · Ó Coileáin · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Coileán, 'young hound / whelp'. Lords of Connello in Limerick, driven into west Cork — where, at Woodfield near Clonakilty, Michael Collins was born. The 'young hound' of the name fitted the Big Fellow exactly.
• Comerford · Comartún · Norman
  From Comberford, Staffordshire. Kilkenny merchant-gentry under the Butlers, papermakers and wine-shippers; a Comerford mint-master struck the Confederation's emergency coinage in 1642.
• Comiskey · Mac Cumascaigh · Gaelic sept
  Son of Cumascach, 'the confuser' or 'mixer'. A Monaghan family with a seat in the county, whose pedigree was traced to Fiacha Suidhe, a brother of Conn of the Hundred Battles.
• Concannon · Ó Concheanainn · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cú Cheanainn, 'fair-headed hound'. A chiefly family of Uí Maine, seated at Kiltullagh in east Galway — one of the names that has barely moved in eight hundred years.
• Condon · Condún · Norman
  De Caunteton — from Welsh Marches. Marcher lords of Condons' Country on the Blackwater, Gaelic in all but origin; their castle at Cloghleagh guarded the Araglin fords through every rising from 1641 to '98.
• Conlan · Ó Conalláin / Ó Caoindealbháin · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Conallán — a diminutive of Conall. The O'Connellans were chiefs of Crioch Tullach in Tyrone, and a separate line, the Ó Caoindealbháin, were princes of Uí Laeghaire in Meath before the Normans came. Woulfe files the name as a Roscommon one, found in all four provinces by the sixteenth century.
• Conneely · Mac Conghaile / Ó Conghaile · Gaelic sept
  Son of Conghal — 'hound' and 'valour'. An old surname of West Connacht, still common in Galway and Mayo, and the source of the village name Ballyconneely. Local legend held that the Conneelys were descended from seals, and that the family would not eat them.
• Connery · Ó Conaire · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Conaire, 'keeper of the hound'. A Munster name of the Waterford and Wexford country. Pádraic Ó Conaire, one of the first modern writers in Irish, carried the Gaelic form.
• Connolly · Ó Conghalaigh · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Conghalach, 'valiant as a hound'. Monaghan's great name — and, through Edinburgh-born James Connolly of 1916, one written into the Proclamation of the Republic itself.
• Considine · Mac Consaidín · Gaelic sept
  Son of Constantine. Son of Constantine — a Roman emperor's name, taken up in Ireland as a Christian flourish and worn by a Gaelic family who were anything but Roman. Woulfe makes them a branch of the O'Briens in Clare, descended from Domhnall Mór Ó Briain, King of Munster, who died in 1194.
• Coogan · Mac Cogadháin · Gaelic sept
  Son of Cogadhán — from cogadh, 'war'. A Kilkenny name, from Mac Cogadháin, and distinct from the Norman de Cogans of Cork despite the similar spelling in English — the two converged on the page rather than in any family. It is one of the names Woulfe's 1923 dictionary does not carry, which is worth saying plainly: the standard reference for Irish surnames has gaps, and a name being absent from it is not evidence of anything except that Woulfe did not record it.
• Cooney · Ó Cuana · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cuana. First recorded in Tyrone in the twelfth century, later found in the Loughrea barony of Galway, where the townland of Ballycooney keeps the name, and afterwards in Clare and Mayo.
• Corcoran · Ó Corcráin · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Corcrán, 'purple-faced'. From Fermanagh church lands and Munster farms; Michael Corcoran of the New York 69th refused to parade for the Prince of Wales in 1860 — and led the Irish Brigade to war a year later.
• Corrigan · Ó Corragáin · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Corragán. A Fermanagh name connected with the Maguires, common in the county's seventeenth-century records and widespread across Ireland since.
• Costello · Mac Oisdealbhaigh · Norman-Gaelic
  Son of Oisdealbh — the first Norman family to take a 'Mac'. Norman de Angulos who went native so early they became the first Norman house in Ireland to adopt a Gaelic 'Mac' name — the barony of Costello in Mayo remembers them.
• Coughlan · Ó Cochláin / Mac Cochláin · Gaelic sept
  Descendant or son of Cochlán — from cochall, 'cloak' or 'hood'. Two families: the Ó Cochláin of west Cork around Barryroe, and the Mac Cochláin lords of Delvin Eathra in Offaly, whose castles guarded the Shannon at Clonmacnoise.
• Coyne · Ó Cadhain · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cadhan — a personal name from the barnacle goose. Woulfe places them at Partry in Mayo, and they are still numerous across Connacht. Also anglicised Kyne — and sometimes translated outright as Barnacle, which is how Nora Barnacle of Galway, James Joyce's wife, came by her surname.
• Craig · — · Ulster Scots
  Scots for 'crag, rock'. Lowland Scots settlers named for the rock itself; James Craig, a Belfast distiller's son, became Northern Ireland's first Prime Minister — the name stamped on one side of partition.
• Creagh · Craobhach · Gaelic sept (Dalcassian)
  'of the branch' — from craobh, a branch. A branch of the O'Neills of Clare who, tradition says, took the name from an ancestor who carried a green branch into a battle with the Norsemen at Limerick. They became one of the merchant families of Limerick city, appearing again and again in its lists of mayors and bailiffs.
• Cronin · Ó Cróinín · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Crónín, 'little dark-yellow one'. A sept of the ancient Corcu Loígde of west Cork, long associated with the church lands around Gougane Barra, where the Lee rises — as Cork a name as the river itself.
• Crowley · Ó Cruadhlaoich · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cruadhlaoch, 'hard hero'. A fighting sept transplanted from Connacht to west Cork as swordsmen for the MacCarthys — 'hard heroes' by name, mercenaries by trade, Corkmen by adoption.
• Cullen · Ó Cuilinn · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Cuileann, 'holly'. A sept of the holly tree from the Wicklow-Wexford borders; Paul Cardinal Cullen of Kildare became Ireland's first cardinal and effectively redesigned the modern Irish church.
• Culloty · Ó Codlata · Gaelic sept
  Descendant of Codladh, 'sleep'. Woulfe gives it in one line: descendant of Codladh, sleep, a rare Kerry surname, pronounced Ó Collata. He records O Collitie, Culloty and Cullity as the anglicised forms.
• Curran · Ó Corráin · Gaelic septs (several)
  Descendant of Corrán. At least three or four unrelated families of the name, from Fermanagh to Kerry. The Kerry Currans are reckoned to descend from the Uí Liatháin kings of east Munster.
• Cusack · Ciomhsóg · Norman
  From Cussac in Guyenne. Pale gentry of Meath for 700 years; Clare schoolteacher Michael Cusack, 'Citizen Cusack', founded the GAA in 1884 and put a Norman name on Croke Park's Cusack Stand.

Also spelled with C

These are listed on the atlas under another spelling, but the C form is the one many families carry.