An Cléireach (Gaelic: The Clerk) is a novel by the Irish writer Darach Ó Scolaí, published in 2007 and winner of the 2007 Oireachtas Prize for Literature.
In north Munster in the year 1650, as the remnants of the royalist army flee from the victorious parliamentarians, a band of poets and soldier-scribes are brought together and, regardless of the proximity of the enemy, spend the night storytelling.
His hereditary responsibility brings him to the Spanish Netherlands, to Bohemia where he takes part in the Battle of White Mountain as a musketeer in captain Somhairle Mac Domhnaill's company, and from there to the Irish College of St Anthony in Leuven (Louvain), in the company of Brother Mícheál Ó Cléirigh and Father Brian Mac Giolla Coinnigh, and finally back to Ireland during the wars of the Irish Catholic Confederation and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.
Tadhg Dubh Ó Cróinín in The Limerick Leader emphasizes the credibility and verisimilitude of the writing that succeeds in convincing the reader that at all times he is in the centre of the vortex no matter where the action takes him.
[3] Philip Cummings in Lá Nua reads the novel as a contemporary fiction, drawing attention to the author's tricks and modern conscious narrative.