Can anyone help please ?

I was mystified also about Sean Dunne’s attitude. He had said online that Arthur and/or the brewery was in league with the “forces of British colonialism”. So I sympathized by email that he had had to study at University College Dublin, and then Trinity College Dublin, both of which had been set up and paid for by the same er, forces of colonialism. Being an American sociology lecturer he didn’t find that at all odd / funny / ironic. But he is studying for a doctorate so he must be really clever.

– The reason for coming to Dublin from Co. Down was the clearances in 1657 during Henry Cromwell’s administration (in the notes). Even the Protestant branches of the Magennis clan had their land taken.

Arthur’s claim to be descended from the Magennis clan chiefs was probably not invented by him, as his father and uncle and in-law cousins were all still alive when he married. Feasibly it was assumed c.1700 and the DNA shows that they at least had the right county of origin.

Nobody else has mentioned “Guiness”, about 7 miles southwest of Ballinahinch; I say that this aspect is now very arguable, but cannot be definite. Guiness townland passed to the Forde family, who still live at Seaforde; the first Mr Forde was diplomatic enough to marry a McCartan girl and everyone thinks well of them.

– The yeast: you are possibly right and I relied on a different genetics PhD boffin here. It was found to be adaptable, that is it mutated in the “right” way, most of the time. I have never worked with yeasts. The point is that the same strain used in the 1750s, much mutated perhaps, is still used today.

– Moyne = Moyne’s a G, & some said it was the nearest you could get to Lord Money, but also Muine = a small bog. So it was a multi-lateral joke. The actual Moyne place he loved to visit, when staying at Ashford, was the famous abbey on the west coast. No link at all to the family there, probably just fond childhood memories.

– Ard Illaun was a feasible-but-mangled spelling in 1880, long before An Caighdeán Oifigiúil was imposed on us in the 1960s. It had to be pronounceable in London and Galway, but was wrongly said as Ardy-lawn. In Joyce’s Ulysses one of the undressing girls is said to have “Two Ardilauns”. Connecting the ultra-respectable lord with a tart was a joke in 1921 that would be less obvious today.

– The was some press coverage and letters against the choice of the Iveagh title in the 1890s. Clearly we thought we were illegitimately descended from the chiefs, an acceptable aspect in the Gaelic world. There was no written link, and the DNA explains why. But the actual Magennis title granted in 1623 was quite different: “Viscount Magennis of Iveagh”.

Best wishes, Patrick.

I doubt if there’s really a pun there in Ardilaun (Ard Oileán in Irish) — too many consonants missing. And I very much doubt if puns based on a stage-Irish accent were part of the ascendancy’s repertoire of parlour wordgames. Smells a bit of Myles na gCopaleen, that one. Fortuna favit 40 bus, etc.

Lord Ardilaun, of course, was the man who bought up all the private shares in St Stephen’s Green and handed it as a gift to the people of Dublin, and his statue is on the Green opposite the College of Surgeons - do more than one in a thousand Dubliners who pass his statue every day know who he is? The “other” Guinness peer, Lord Moyne (Moyne being also in Galway) is surely a pun - I mean, “Moyne’s a Guinness”, please …

I’d almost agree with you about McQuaid, but the old Archbish is supposed to have subbed Patrick Kavanagh whenever the poet didn’t even have a shilling for the meter (which was most of the time, of course) so we can forgive the reactionary old buzzard QUITE a lot …

Dublin is of course full of things named after the Iveaghs, most prominently Iveagh House, Benjamin Guinness’s former residence and now the home of, and a colloquialism for, the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Also Iveagh Hall in Trinity College Library, built with Guinness money after the (Catholic) Government in the 1960s reneged on a promise to fund the building within the (Protestant) University. Really they should have called it John Charles McQuaid Is A W****r Hall.