Ó Duilearga/Delargy

The location of the Delargys has been for many centuries the Glens of Antrim on the N.E coast of Ireland. Any of the names found elsewhere in Ireland and abroad come from that beautiful stretch of fertile glens and friendly hills.

Irish surnames as we know them today came into being in the early medieval period. They had many different origins, the Delargy surname being one, which refers to some feature of the landscape- a type not unknown in many other countries. Ó Dui(bh)learga means ‘the descendant of the black - haired people of the hill-slope’.

The name has no connection whatever with France or Spain and is known in Irish historical records as far back as c.800.

The original name of the Delargys seems to have been on the N.W. coast of Ireland, at Dunfeeny near Ballycastle in Co.Mayo. The name occurs in an early medieval account of the land of the great O’Dowd family on both sides of the River Moy on Co. Mayo. In Irish they were known as the Úi Duibhlearga, a rent-paying population group under the lordship of the O’Dowds. How and when the Delargys moved from Mayo to Antrim is not known. They may have formed part of a migration of a branch of the O’Hara family from territory near the O’Dowds.

The name occurs in an English document of 1660 as O’Delargy, this being the anglicised form of Ó Duilearga. As the ‘bh’ ( a ‘v’ sound ) is no longer pronounced the name in Irish is now spelt Ó Duilearga.

The ‘g’ is always pronounced hard (as in the word gate) both in Irish and in its anglicised form which is an approximate phonetic representation of the original Gaelic form.