Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin

Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin (c. 1715 – 1795), known in English as Timothy O'Sullivan, was a composer of mostly Christian poetry in the Irish language whose Pious Miscellany was reprinted over 40 times in the early 19th century.

[4] After moving to Dungarvan, County Waterford during the 1760s, he experienced a religious conversion and thereafter primarily composed Christian poetry[1] in Munster Irish upon themes such as the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, chastity, the rosary, and St Declán of Ardmore.

[citation needed] Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin is said to have collapsed and died while praying inside St. Patrick's Church in Waterford in April 1795, and lies buried in Ballylaneen.

[6] While manuscripts of Ó Súilleabháin's Christian poetry had already circulated before his death, and in 1802 a printed collection of twenty-five religious poems was published at Clonmel under the title Timothy O'Sullivan's Irish Pious Miscellany.

Between 1816 and 1879 more than a dozen new editions of the Pious Miscellany were printed and sold in Clonmel, Cork City, Limerick, and Dublin, which leaves little doubt that it was the most widely read Irish-language book ever published before the later Gaelic revival.