His wife Sheila, with whom he had a daughter and two sons, would have preferred to be closer to civilisation, but she always kept the house immaculate, with brass coal-scuttle and fender gleaming on the hearth.When The Poacher’s Handbook came out in 1950, it was recognised as a masterpiece of rural writing, and for the next 20 years Niall/McNeillie contributed regular country columns to the Spectator and Country Life He also edited the monthly magazine Angling. Yet he remained reclusive and, even when his work was widely recognised, preferred to shelter behind his pseudonym and keep to the high ground.Wiry, tough and bearded, a hard worker with a fierce temper, he looked like a shepherd or a hill farmer, and was described by one friend as “a delightful companion with a big depressive demon on his back”. He liked people who got on and did things, and numbered several Welsh Nationalists among his friends.His greatest love was trout-fishing: he tied his own flies, and insisted on using a model like a tiny black bottle-brush, which was effective against the brownies in the Welsh lakes, but not much use anywhere else. Fellow anglers regard his Trout from the Hills (1961) as one of the most beautiful fishing books ever written. This purported to be a memoir, but when, years later, a new publisher took him back to some of the tarns he had described, it became clear that he had created an idealised, semi-mythical landscape.In all he wrote more than 40 books, including the memoir A Galloway Childhood (1967), and a biography of the outstanding bird artist Charles Tunnicliffe, Portrait of a Country Artist (1980).For the last years of his life he and his wife moved to a house in the Chilterns. She was happy there, but he regarded the environment as suburban and, while he gloomily shot the grey squirrels which were damaging his trees, he hankered for the high hills of Wales.Duff Hart-Davis. OLIVER MACDONAGH, pre-eminent in the professional generation that succeeded the founding fathers of the subject, R.D Edwards and T.W Moody, was in many ways the ideal Irish historian.

If the promise was not borne out in experience, responsibility might be levied on the country rather than on the individual. Oliver Ormond Gerard Michael MacDonagh, historian: born Carlow 23 August 1924; called to the Irish Bar, King’s Inns 1945; Lecturer and Fellow, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge 1952-64, Visiting Fellow 1986, Honorary Fellow 1987; Visiting Fellow, ANU 1963-64, W.K. Hancock Professor of History 1973-90 (Emeritus); Professor of History, Flinders University 1964-68; Professor of Modern History, University College, Cork 1968-73; married 1952 Carmel Hamilton (three sons, four daughters); died Sydney 22 May 2002. His birthplace – Carlow – had not been a notable focus of conflict, lying at a distance from the contentious border with Unionist Ulster and equally remote from the heartlands of southern republicanism in Cork and Kerry.The MacDonaghs were equally middle-of-the-road Both parents had worked for banks. Michael MacDonagh was serving in Limerick, but his wife (n?Loretto Oliver) returned to her native Carlow for the birth.

Subsequently, the family moved to Roscommon, where Oliver Ormond Gerard Michael MacDonagh began his serious education with the Christian Brothers.These were the classic conditions of middle-class advance in the early years of de Valeran Ireland – a rigorous Catholic-nationalist schooling, backed up with greater financial security than the public facts suggested. The economic nostrum of delayed gratification, so often taken as the epitome of Protestant thrift, characterised much of middle-class Catholic Ireland. When, in the autumn of 2000 MacDonagh came to write about his growing up (published as “Words without End, Amen” in the Irish Review), he passed over the Brothers in silence, preferring to allude to a Montessori kindergarten.For his secondary education, he was sent to Clongowes Wood College – James Joyce’s Alma Mater – staying for a longer period in the boarding school than Joyce’s father had been able to afford and publishing some verse in a Jesuit magazine. From there, MacDonagh proceeded to University College, Dublin, where he read History and Law, but associated with the literary set. Graduating BA in 1944, he was called to the Irish Bar a year later. As the isolation in which Ireland had immersed itself during the Second World War ended, the young MacDonagh was ready to seize the opportunity.He was commissioned to write a chapter on “Irish Emigration to the United States of America and the British Colonies” for a book intended originally to mark the centenary of the 1845-47 Great Famine.

Devised by Eamon de Valera, and for that reason, among others, bedevilled by caution, quibbling and the odd instance of academic catastrophe, The Great Famine did not finally appear until 1956. In the meantime, MacDonagh himself had emigrated, though for the moment no further than to Cambridge, which became a second spiritual home.In 1947, aided by an Irish scholarship, he commenced work on a PhD at Peterhouse, moving in 1952 to St Catharine’s as a College Lecturer and Fellow. Two years later, he married Carmel Hamilton, and they had seven children. MacDonagh had established himself impressively, but no opportunity to return home presented itself until the end of the next decade. Spiritual homes were elusive destinations.His research years had resulted in A Pattern of Government Growth: the Passenger Acts and their enforcement (1961), published by Macgibbon & Kee, an enterprising new company of which Robert Kee (who has also written on Irish history) was a moving spirit.