in that of a barony situated on the Dingle peninsula in Kerry. But the descendants of Duben were at one time much more widely spread, and the island of Valentia is found called Dairbhre of the Ui Duibne,[1] or the D. of Duben's Descendants; and, according to O'Donovan, the principal families of the Corco Duibne, which were the Ui Failbhe or O'Falvys, the Ui Seagha or O'Sheas, and the Ui Congaile or O'Connells, were in possession of the following lands shortly before the English invasion: the O'Falvys, of Corcaguinny; the O'Sheas, of the territory of Ui Rathach, now called the Barony of Iveragh,
- ↑ The Bk. of Rights, O'Donovan's note, p. 47.
as Corc's, namely, the barony of Clanwilliam in county Tipperary. See the Four Masters, A.D. 1043, 1044, 1100, 1503. Cuirc is written Quirk in English, while in early Irish it was Curci, attested by an ogam in the neighbourhood of Dingle. As to corco or corca, the dative plural ó na Corcaibh, 'from the Corca,' is given in the Book of Rights, p. 97, and the genitive plural na (g-) Corc, 'of the Corca,' p. 104, in reference possibly, as O'Donovan suggests, to clans called Corca Achlann, Corca Firtri and Corca Mogha; a plural Cuirc is treated in the same way as meaning the Corca in a note by Prof. Hennessy to his edition of the Book of Fenagh, pp. 30, 31; but these last seem to have been so termed as the descendants of a Corc Ferdoit son of Fergus, and the term might be Englished 'the Corcs.' The late tendency was very decidedly to prefer corca to corco, as in Corcaguinny and Corkaree, a barony in the county of Westmeath, supposed to be the tribe-name given in Adamnán's Vita S. Columbæ as Korkureti (Reeves's edition, p. 89). So I am on the whole inclined to see in korku and corco a word like the Old Irish mocu, moco or mitco (treated later as maccu and even mac-u), to which Stokes, in Kuhn's Beitræge, i. 345, would give the sense of grandson or descendant. It entered with a collective meaning into clan-names, such as Mocu-Dalon, Mocu-Sailni and Mocu-Runtir, Latinized 'genus Runtir:' see also the remarks on the word in Rhys' Lec. on Welsh Phil.2 pp. 407—412, but cancel the suggestion there made that the word involves ua or o, 'grandson.' Perhaps neither corco nor muco is a word of Celtic origin.
