A cry of despair against the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, and its consequences for the world and class to which he belonged, his Faisean Chláir Éibhir bears a striking resemblance to the poetry of the great Dáibhí Ó Bruadair: "A trick of this false world has laid me low: servants in every home with grimy English but no regard for one of the poet class save "Out!
[3] In Threnodia Hiberno-Catholica, his death is described: "He was pursued into a cave by the heretics, who there cut off his head, placed it on a pole at the gates of a certain town and left his body to be devoured by the wild beasts."
The historian William Carrigan writes that according to local oral tradition, a slaughter was committed at a Mass rock in Tinwear, a quarter of a mile from Durrow.
According to Fearghus Ó Fearghail in Kilkenny History and Society, "Bernard Fitzpatrick, who had administered the díocese after Bishop Rothe’s death from his hiding place in his ancestral home in County Laois, was tracked down and killed in 1653.
Mac Giolla Phádraig's most famous work deplored the anglicisation of ordinary poor Irish farm labourers, pejoratively known as churls, in the 1600s.