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The Niadh Nask: An Alleged Irish Order  of Knighthood  

In what has been undoubtedly the greatest Irish genealogical and heraldic fraud of modern times, Terence MacCarthy of Belfast claimed until his enforced   'abdication' in October 1999 to be a Gaelic Chief, 'The MacCarthy Mór', and  also  'Prince of Desmond', head of the 'Royal Eóghanacht Dynasty of Munster'.
Crucial  to MacCarthy's operations was an organisation known as the 'Niadh Nask', an  alleged ancient Gaelic order of knighthood in the gift of his 'dynasty' whose  members supposedly wore a 'golden chain'. Is there in fact any  evidence that  such an order ever existed?

MacCarthy's hoax was publicly exposed by the present writer and a Sunday  Times article in June 1999 (for a summary account of the affair see http://homepage.eircom.net/~seanjmurphy/irhismys/maccarthy.htm).
  A month later the Chief Herald of Ireland withdrew recognition of MacCarthy's   chiefly status, a rather belated action given that his Office's management had known for years that he was bogus. Up to this point, and largely because its Chief enjoyed the endorsement of the Chief Herald's Office, the Niadh Nask had successfully attracted a membership of over 400, some of whom were admitted  gratis on account of their prestige, but most of whom paid $850 for the  privilege. Thus the Niadh Nask operation may have contributed about $250,000 to  the estimated $1,000,000 which the MacCarthy Mór Hoax gathered in (one source  puts the money total as high as $4,000,000, which may be an exaggeration). The membership of the Niadh Nask included former Irish Prime Ministers Charles Haughey and Albert Reynolds, a number of Irish Chiefs both real and fake, the heraldic expert Gerard Crotty, the former Norroy and Ulster King of Arms John P B Brooke-Little, a brace of American military men including General William  Westmoreland, and some other notable figures such as the author Peter  Berresford  Ellis and the academic Dr Katherine Simms (The Niadh Nask
International Roll  1998
, Clonmel 1998).

Terence MacCarthy is himself a trained scholar and graduate of Queen's   University Belfast, being dubbed by a fellow 'Chief', O Long of Garranelongy,  as  'Tadhg na Leabhair' or 'Terence of the Books'. The voluminous series of   MacCarthyite publications includes a collection of essays on the Niadh Nask  edited by MacCarthy's associate Andrew Davison, the equally bogus 'Count of Clandermond' and indeed 'Secretary General' of the order (Links in a Golden  Chain, Royal Eóghanacht Society, Clonmel 1998). Among the book's contributors is the former 'Ollamh' or Historian to MacCarthy, Peter Berresford  Ellis, who lamented the 'ignorance of the realities of Gaelic Ireland'
displayed  by Irish historians, who were allegedly unaware even of the existence
of the  Niadh Nask (Links, page i). MacCarthy's contribution is a piece on the  history of the Niadh Nask, which to the unwary may appear to be  structured and  referenced in a scholarly manner (Links, pages1-27).
MacCarthy quotes  from a range of sources to support his contention that the
Niadh Nask had  existed for centuries, having been founded by King Muinheamhoin
and bestowed by  kings of the Eóghanacht Dynasty, later being kept in existence
by their noble  MacCarthy descendants. These are all very large claims which of
course need to  be examined critically.

James Algrant first publicly raised doubts about the Niadh Nask in 1997, in an article which can still be read at http://caltrap.bbsnet.com/page1.html,  and which  perceptively forecast that the order's 'nobiliary claims will  certainly be the  subject of debate and amusement for many years'. MacCarthy's  furious response  apparently included a threat of criminal libel proceedings, a  technique used  with other critics as well. In addition to querying MacCarthy's  title and pedigree, contributors to the Internet discussion group rec.heraldry  began  asking questions about the Niadh Nask around the same time, which  MacCarthy's  then strong band of supporters could not satisfactorily answer. In  the wake of  MacCarthy's exposure in 1999 the present writer received a copy of a  referenced  report by another author, who indicated that he wished to remain  anonymous,  which report claimed that MacCarthy's account of the Niadh Nask was  laden with  historical distortions and outright fabrications. The writer has  personally
checked the references in this report and found them to be  substantially  correct. Thus, for example, Geoffrey Keating is quoted by  MacCarthy as  follows: 
No king could settle down in Tara till he should first wear
the  Nasc Niadh around his neck. This was the same as to say that he should have
  received the degree of knight of chivalry. For as the knight of chivalry is
  called Miles Torquatus, so also Nia Naisc is applied in Ireland to these
  champions. (Links, page 8.)


Now Keating was a somewhat credulous author who tended to repeat legend as 
fact, but in this case he is being made to say more than he had written. What 
MacCarthy omitted to show was that Keating was quoting and glossing a mythical 
'learned druid' who declared that it was one of the geasa or taboos of  Tara, 
'that no king should settle down in Tara with a view to
assuming  the sovereignty of Ireland till he should first wear the nasc niadh
round his  neck.'
This was the same as to say that he should have received the degree of  Knight of Chivalry. For as the knight of chivalry is called Miles Torquatus, so  also Nia Naisc is applied in Irish to the champion who wore a nasc or chain  round his neck. (Keating, History of Ireland, 2, Irish Texts Society,  London 1908, page 405.)
In a like vein, MacCarthy cites another source: 
. . . the Annals of Clonmacnoise which record that: 
'Mownemon was the first king that ever devised golden chains fit to be
worn  about men's necks . . . He was of the sept of Munster'. Here then, for the
first  time, we have a clear allusion to The Niadh Nask as a Momonian order.

  (Links, page 5.)
Here is the full quotation, in the archaic early seventeenth-century English   of the translator Conell Mageoghagan: 
Mownemon was the first king that ever divised goldin chains
fit  to be worn about men's neckes and rings to be put on theire fingers, which
was  then in great use, he raigned five yeares and then died. He was of the sept
of  Munster.
(Denis Murphy Editor, The Annals of Clonmacnoise, Royal   Society of Antiquaries, Dublin 1896, page 34.)
What we have here is a simple statement concerning fashionable adornments,  with no indication whatsoever of the existence of the Niadh Nask as a
'Momonian'  or any other kind of order.
More seriously, MacCarthy quotes a reference from the twelfth-century text
Caithréim Ceallacháin Caisil thus: 
For the heroes had neither blue helmets, nor shining coats of
  mail, but only elegant tunics with smooth fringes, and shields, and beautiful,
  finely wrought collars of gold to protect bodies, and necks and gentle heads.
  (Links, page 5.)

In fact, the exact quotation is as follows: 
For the heroes had neither blue helmets nor shining coats of mail, but only elegant tunics with smooth fringes, and shields, and beautiful, finely wrought collars to protect bodies, and necks, and gentle heads. (Edition compiled by Alexander Bugge, Christiania 1905, page  64.)
The substitution of 'collars of gold' for plain 'collars' is no mere transcriber's slip, but a textual fabrication designed to give spurious  substance to the existence of a 'Niadh Nask' order.
As further 'evidence' of the existence of the Niadh Nask, MacCarthy points to  the below illustrated portrait of his 'predecessor' King Donal IX MacCarthy  Mór,  died 1596, which features the alleged cross and chain regalia of the order.
At first MacCarthy represented this as a 'surviving portrait of  1568' (Historical Essays on the Kingdom of Munster, Kansas City,  Missouri,1994, page 28), but more recently it is claimed to be 'an eighteenth century copy'. Rather than a genuine MacCarthy family heirloom handed down over the centuries, there are suspicions that the portrait is that of an as yet unidentified individual, or else is a recent concoction, and indeed the 'peas
in  a pod' resemblance between 'King Donal' and 'Prince Terence' has been commented  upon. If the portrait is in fact genuine, there should be no problem  getting an  accredited art expert to validate it.
The Gaelic word niadh means 'champion' or 'hero', while nasc means 'collar', and the two words together simply meant  'champion's collar', or figuratively a 'rallying chief'. The term was used in the latter sense in a late seventeenth-century poem by Egan O'Rahilly in the  form nascnia, which MacCarthy characteristically tries to interpret as 
further evidence for the existence of his 'order' (Links, pages16,18). 
MacCarthy also cites later references to the Niadh Nask by authors such as  Anthony Marmion, Canon Burke and P W Joyce, all of which appear to be developments of, or equally as imaginative as Keating's account  (Links,  pages 2-3, 8). Terence was so swept away by his own powers of  invention that he  even suggests at one point that the ancient Niadh Nask order
'may indeed have  served as the prototype for the Knights of the Round Table in
the Arthurian  cycle'!
(Links, pages 7-8). There is in fact no
contemporary  documentary evidence whatsoever for the existence in medieval
times of an actual  order of knighthood called the Niadh Nask, and the words  niadh naisc or nasc nia were used descriptively or as generic  terms of praise for  warriors or nobles.
The merry saga of fabrication was carried through into the modern period by MacCarthy, with undocumented or highly questionable assertions that the Niadh Nask survived among exiled branches of the MacCarthy family in France  (Links, pages 18-22). Hence it was, according to MacCarthy, that his grandfather Thomas Donal MacCarthy was summoned to Toulouse from Belfast in  1905  and appointed MacCarthy Mór by a 'Pacte de Famille' agreed by prominent  French  MacCarthys, which event is absolutely undocumented of course. The  effrontery  continued with the assertion that MacCarthy's grandfather made King  Zog of  Albania a Niadh Nask in the 1930s, and the bogus Duc de Saint Bar is  casually  denominated as the order's French representative (Links, page
23). None  of the hundreds who signed up to join MacCarthy's order appeared to  have been  able to see through this patent nonsense, and of course, there was no  one to  guide them, the Office of the Chief Herald cynically taking no action  until its  hand was forced in June 1999. In a replay, the Office claimed that  because  certain unspecified 'legal issues' have been raised, it could not take  any  action in the case of MacCarthy's great-uncle, 'Maguire of Fermanagh', nor  in  the cases of other still recognised bogus and questionable Chiefs listed on this site.
Following Terence MacCarthy's abdication in October 1999, his younger brother 
Conor MacCarthy of Belfast 'succeeded' him as 'MacCarthy Mór'. Conor MacCarthy 
maintains a website publicising his equally baseless royal and chiefly claims  at http://www.maccarthymor.net/. The  site, now  removed, included Terence's pseudo-scholarly article on the Niadh Nask  and a  retaliatory report against the present writer, with a strong impression  overall  that the fallen 'Chief' remained the pen behind the throne.  Interestingly  enough, Terence MacCarthy's Niadh Nask article has appeared in  different  versions over the years, sometimes with inconsistent content. Thus an  earlier
version of the Niadh Nask article stated that Samuel Trant MacCarthy of  County
Kerry succeeded to the position of MacCarthy Mór by family agreement in  1906,
although it later became convenient to represent this gentleman as one who  had
usurped a title rightly belonging to the Belfast MacCarthys, and to invent instead the 1905 'Pacte de Famille' yarn (article on Niadh Nask formerly at http://www2.smumn.edu/uasal/nnhist.html,  now  removed).
Following the collapse of Terence MacCarthy's Niadh Nask, in 2001 Charles   McKerrell of Hillhouse, former 'Chancellor and Brehon' of the order, endeavoured  to revive it under the title 'Nia Naisc'. Now based in Scotland, it  is claimed  that the restructured body is a 'nobiliary fraternity' with  charitable aims, and  that it is intended to secure recognition from Lord Lyon
(http://www.peteheineman.com/Nia%20Naisc.htm). 
 Among the more prominent members of the Nia Naisc is the Baron Castleshort, a bondsman' of McKerrell of Hillhouse, who has been pictured wearing the  insignia  of the body.
The main element of the Niadh Nask insignia is a cross pommé inset with a Greek cross described in MacCarthy's time as 'either red, green or blue, depending upon the companion's division within the Order (First, Second or Third, respectively)'. Hereditary and First Division Niadh Nask 'may surround  their arms with the collar, while companions of the Second and Third Divisions  may not' (Niadh Nask Insignia: A Guide to the Wearing of the Insignia of the  Eóghanacht Royal House of Munster, 1997, pages 4-5). There was  considerable  controversy in 2001 when the Heraldry Society of Scotland
reproduced McKerrell  of Hillhouse's arms with the Niadh Nask/Nia Naisc insignia
included, and the  image was eventually amended (discussion on rec.heraldry,
archived at http://groups.google.com). Again, it must be  stated that the insignia of the Niadh Nask are not in reality centuries old, but  like the order itself are a recent concoction.
In conclusion, the Niadh Nask in all its variants is, as we have shown, based   on historical fantasy and fabrication, and furthermore is so tainted by association with the MacCarthy Mór fraud that it would be advisable for former members simply to let it die away. In short, the Niadh Nask is a testament to the dishonesty and greed of its originators and to the too trusting nature not  to say credulity of those who joined, as well as yet another demonstration of the abysmally low standards applying in Irish genealogy and heraldry.

Sean J. Murphy, MA.
Centre for Irish Genealogical and Historical Studies
29 November 2001, revised 23 January 2009

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