Ciarán was born about the year 516 — some accounts say 512 — in the district of Fuerty in County Roscommon, in the province of Connacht. His father Beoit was a carpenter and chariot-maker; his mother Darerca was the daughter of Ercan of Glas, a poet, and the old genealogies trace the family to the royal line of Éremón. Ciarán was the third son of the house. The deacon Justus baptised him and was his first teacher, and as a boy he was set to herd the family cattle, a childhood of labour and open fields that never left his manner. From the beginning his life carried a resemblance the earliest biographers loved to point out: the son of a carpenter, who would die at thirty-three.
When the time came for study he went to Clonard, to the school of Saint Finnian, where he was formed alongside Columba and Brendan and became one of that company later honoured as the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. Tradition tells that his parents opposed his going and would give him nothing for the journey; so Ciarán blessed one of the family cows, signing a cross upon its forehead, and the beast followed him to Clonard and gave milk enough for the whole community. At Clonard he outstripped his fellows in learning and was himself made a teacher, and was entrusted with the education of the daughter of the king of Cualu. His friend Columba said of him, "He was a lamp, blazing with the light of wisdom."
About the year 534 he left Clonard for Inishmore in the Aran Islands, to place himself under Saint Enda. There he lived some seven years in the hard poverty of that rock, and there Enda ordained him priest and read for him the vision of the Great Tree, bidding him build his church in the middle of Ireland. He also formed the friendships that marked his life: with Senan, whom he visited on Scattery Island about 541, and with Kevin of Glendalough. For a time he served at Iseal Chiaráin in the centre of the country, where he was reckoned a great scholar; but his open-handedness to the poor was thought to endanger the goods of the house, and he was sent away — a reproach that is his glory, for he had simply believed the Gospel about giving.
Led, the old accounts say, by a stag, he came to Inis Aingin, Hare Island in Lough Ree, and monks from all over Ireland gathered to study under him. Then, with a small band of brothers — eight in some accounts, ten in others — he came in January 544 to the eastern bank of the Shannon between Athlone and Banagher, in what is now County Offaly, and founded the monastery of Clonmacnoise. The prince Diarmait mac Cerbaill, soon to be the first Christian High King of Ireland, gave the ground and came himself to help raise the first church. Ciarán worked with his own hands upon the buildings, and gave his monks a rule of great austerity, for he wanted men who intended to renounce the world entirely. That rule proved so influential that in time about half the monasteries of Ireland followed it.
His abbacy was brief. Plague came, and Ciarán died at Clonmacnoise on 9 September — the year given as 544, 546 or 549 — only some months, or at most a few years, after the first stones were laid, aged about thirty-three. Tradition says his sanctity was so evident that some of the Irish saints, jealous of him, prayed that he might die young, all except Columba; and that when death drew near he asked his disciples to leave his body to waste away upon a hillside, "as the body of a sick deer is left," telling them to keep his spirit rather than his relics. His wish was not granted: his grave became one of the great places of Irish pilgrimage.
The monastery he planted outlived him by a thousand years and became one of the foremost centres of learning and religious life in Ireland, drawing students from Ireland, Britain and the Continent. Its abbots bore the title Comarba of Saint Ciarán, and — unusually among Irish houses — that dignity was never made hereditary, a lasting monument to the humble origins of a carpenter's son. Clonmacnoise survived Viking plundering and Anglo-Norman war and was only broken up at the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1552. There, shortly before 1100, was compiled the Lebor na hUidre, the Book of the Dun Cow, the oldest surviving manuscript in the Irish language, which preserves the Táin Bó Cúailnge; its name recalls the cow that followed Ciarán from home, whose hide was kept at Clonmacnoise as a relic. The Clonmacnoise Crozier survives in the National Museum of Ireland, and the ruins remain a place of prayer and pilgrimage to this day.
Ciarán is one of the few Irish saints named in Continental martyrologies, appearing in that of Usuard and in the tenth-century Martyrologium Sangallense. His memory is strong in Scotland as well: Campbeltown in Argyll was formerly Ceann Loch Chille Chiarain, "the head of the loch by the church of Ciarán," and pilgrims still visit a cave near Davaar Island associated with him. The Celtic scholar Charles Plummer even proposed that he, rather than Ciarán of Saigir, is the Saint Piran honoured as patron of Cornwall. His feast is kept on 9 September.
May Saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise obtain for us his own poverty of heart, and the courage to be generous to the poor today even when it costs us something we would rather keep.
