Life
?1740-1819 [var. 1739; Richard Barrett, var. Barret; also Riocard];
b. and lived in Barrack, Erris, Co. Mayo [assoc. with Belmullet]; teacher
and small farmer; provided literary entertainment for local gentry and
wrote celebrated satire of an evil bailiff in the form of a mock-lament
("Eoghan Cóir", 1788); poss. author of "Bean an
Fhir Rua [The Red-Haired Man’s Wife]", a theme taken up by Carleton;
said to have been imprisoned for political connections with United Irishmen
in exile; specimens of his poetry appear in Hardiman’s edn. of O’Flaherty’s
Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connacht (1846), and
in Michael Timony’s Abhráin Ghaedhilge an Iarthair
(1906); buried at Cross Point, N. Co. Mayo. DIW OCIL
- J. Karney [sic], ‘Richard Barrett, the Bard of Mayo’, Gaelic Journal, V (1894), p.136-68;
- Nicholas Williams, Riocard Bairead, Amhrain (Baile Átha Cliath: Clóchomhar 1978), 144pp.
Notes
P. J. Kavanagh notes in ‘Bywords’, Times Literary Supplement
(27 Sept., 1996), that Bairead/Barrett, 1739-1819, a son of Belmullet,
is buried at Cross Point, North Mayo, in an old graveyard surrounded by
the Atlantic on two sides, the side wall of which was recently blasted
by a storm with the result that bones fell to the strand; now collected
and reinterred behind a repaired wall; his grave marked ‘fili’, with the
words, ‘Why spend your leisure bereft of pleasure/Amassing treasure? Why
scrape and save?/Why look so canny at every penny?/You’ll take no money
into the grave.’ (p.16.)
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