[6] No extant traditional genealogical source specifically accords Aonghus Mór and Alasdair Óg with a son named Domhnall.
[15] Specifically, Gesta Annalia II relates that a certain 'Domhnall of the Isles' led a host of Gallovidians to the River Dee where they were defeated by Edward Bruce, and the leader was himself captured.
Domhnall's name appears immediately after that of Alasdair Mac Dubhghaill in a list of men who witnessed a letter from the parliament to the King of France.
[42][note 5] If the records of the English reaching out to Domhnall date to 1315, it would reveal that the Clann Domhnaill leadership was fractured at the onset of the Bruce campaign in Ireland.
[44] Not only had Eóin Mac Dubhghaill been assigned to make overtures to leading Hebrideans—like Domhnall and Gofraidh—but he was placed in command of the English naval forces responsible for retaking the Isle of Man.
[45] The very same year, according to the Bruce, Robert had his fleet dragged across the Tarbert isthmus between Knapdale and the Kintyre peninsula at about the very time his brother, Edward, initiated his invasion of Ireland.
The poem further claims that the Islesmen were dejected as a result of Robert's action, on account of an old prophecy foretelling that whoever could sail their ships across the peninsula would hold dominion in the Isles that no other would be able to withstand.
Although the Bruce specifies that the Clann Domhnaill dynast to whom the king owed his salvation was Aonghus Óg, there is reason to question this claim.
[56] If this fourteenth-century English chronicle is to be believed, Domhnall evidently died in 1318, whilst serving in the Bruce campaign in Ireland,[57] conceivably at the Battle of Faughart.