There are English reports of a sept of the greater O'Neill dynasty known as the Clan Shanes living in the dense forest of Glenconkeyne and Killetragh dating back to the mid-16th century; and another in County Armagh that is related.
During Shane's lifetime, he made claim to the patrimony of these children and thus they were raised in the courts of their various maternal grandfathers and aunts upon his death.
Sixteen years later in 1583, a confederation of the brothers met at the court of their uncle, the Chief of the MacLean clan in the Scottish isles.
When they invaded, the brothers took the English and the O'Neill chiefs by surprise and seized a large sphere of control in eastern Ulster, in alliance with the MacDonalds of Antrim.
In an attempt to characterize them, the English began to refer to the group of brothers as "the Mac-Shanes" which in Gaelic was "the sons of Shane".
In 1593, the Earl of Tyrone had their chief, Phelim mac Cormac Toole O'Neill, killed along the river Bann and seized the lordship away from the Clannaboy estate.
In spite of the Plantation of Ulster, and more specifically the newly created (1613) county of Londonderry, the McShanes felt little encroachment.
When the family was attainted as Irish Jacobites in the 1690s, the heir, Owen McShane, completely dropped any association with the O'Neill name in an attempt to hold his father's small estate.
Though they had little effect in Glenconkeyne, the penal laws (1695–1745) and the influx of Scottish and English settlers into greater Ulster made it increasingly difficult for the Gaelic Irish to hold position and land within Irish society, and thus the name MacShane was eventually shortened to McShane by Owen's son Neil "Clochna" M'Shane, and then again during the 18th and early 19th centuries, Owen's great grandson Patrick translated the surname from the Gaelic "Mac Shane" which is the Ulster dialect spelling of "son of John" to the English "son of John" or Johnson.