Aodh Mag Uidhir, lord of Fermanagh from 1589 to 1600, was the eldest son of Cú Chonnacht Mag Uidhir and Nuala, daughter of Manus O’Donnell. He inherited a lordship whose strength lay in the islands of Lough Erne, just as the Dublin government set about bringing the Ulster lordships under direct rule.
Hugh resisted from the start. In 1592 he sheltered Red Hugh O’Donnell after his escape from Dublin Castle, and when a sheriff was imposed on Fermanagh in 1593 he besieged him and his men in a church, then raided deep into Sligo and Roscommon. Defeated at the Erne ford that October, and with Enniskillen taken by the English early in 1594, he struck back on 7 August 1594, routing a relief column bound for Enniskillen at Drumane ford on the Arney river. The abandoned supplies gave the fight its name: the Ford of the Biscuits.
He recovered Enniskillen in 1595 and kept his country free of government control for the rest of the Nine Years’ War, fighting alongside O’Donnell in Connacht and under Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, at the Yellow Ford in 1598. Late in 1599 he went south with Tyrone into Munster. On 4 March 1600, near Cork, he met Sir Warham St Leger in a skirmish; each mortally wounded the other. His death was keenly felt by the Irish leaders, and he was succeeded by his half-brother, Cú Chonnacht Óg.
Sources and further reading
- Judy Barry, ‘Maguire, Hugh’, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Royal Irish Academy, 2009), doi.org/10.3318/dib.005379.v1
- Geinealaighe Fearmanach, ed. in Analecta Hibernica 3 (1931), and the Society’s family tree