[6] During his residence at the port of St. John's (Irish: Baile Sheáin),[7] Mac Conmara composed multiple Irish-language poems, including praises of Newfoundland and war poetry promoting the Jacobite rising of 1745.
Even though the mixing of languages in verse is now generally assumed to date only from the radical innovations of early 20th-century Modernist poetry, Mac Conmara composed a poem in St. John's with alternating lines in Newfoundland English and Munster Irish.
[8] After leaving Newfoundland he continued for a long period to work as a sailor, and his poem Bán Chnoic Éireann Óigh ("The Fair Hills of Holy Ireland"), is said to have been composed in Hamburg.
He was briefly appointed as parish clerk, but when the Vicar and parishioners discovered how great a rogue he was, Donnchadh Ruadh was dismissed; he then converted back to Catholicism,[11] and composed his poem Duain na hAithrighe ("Song of Repentance").
"[15] While still teaching at Synge Street CBS in Dublin, Francis MacManus wrote and published a trilogy of biographical novels set in Penal times and about the life of Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Conmara.