Liam O'Flaherty and Máirtín Ó Direáin
Two of the century's Irish writers were born a few kilometres apart on the western half of Inishmore. Liam O'Flaherty, from Gort na gCapall below Dún Aonghasa, wrote The Informer and some of the finest short stories in English and Irish; Máirtín Ó Direáin, from Sruthán, grew up speaking nothing but Connacht Irish and became the poet who, with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, remade poetry in the language.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
Liam o'Flaherty's Birthplace, Dún Aonghasa on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
O'Flaherty
Baptised William, son of Maidhc Ó Flaithearta and Maggie Ganley, in a family descended from the O'Flahertys of Connemara and not well off, he served on the Western Front in the Irish Guards from 1916 and was badly wounded in 1917, helped found the Communist Party of Ireland, and left Ireland on 9 July 1922 after the Battle of Dublin. Destitute in London, he wrote: The Sniper and his first novel Thy Neighbour's Wife both appeared in 1923. The Censorship Board banned him after 1929. Dúil, eighteen stories in Irish, came in 1953 near the end of his writing life, and his last novel, Insurrection, on the Easter Rising, in 1950; his play Dorchadas was performed in Irish in 1926 and 2014. A. A. Kelly counted 183 stories for the three-volume Collected Stories of 1999. His brother Tom was a writer and radical too. He died on 7 September 1984.
Ó Direáin
The eldest of four children of Seán Ó Direáin and Mairéad Ní Dhireáin, he was a monoglot until his mid-teens. Louis de Paor calls him one of a trinity of poets who revolutionised Irish-language poetry in the 1940s and 1950s, and Desmond Egan compared him to Machado, Akhmatova and Heine. A broken early love haunts the poems, his translator Frank Sewell says. He won Arts Council awards in 1964 and 1971, the Butler Prize in 1967 and the Ossian Prize in Hamburg in 1977, was a member of Aosdána and died in Dublin on 19 March 1988; Colm Ó Snodaigh of Kíla has set six of his poems, including An tEarrach Thiar, and Wake Forest published his poems with Sewell's translations in 2020. The model on this page pins O'Flaherty's birthplace and the fort above it.
Questions people ask
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Written from Wikipedia, "Liam O'Flaherty" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.