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Harrington, O'Harraughton
Harrington itself is a well-known English name, common in England, but very few indeed of our Irish Harringtons are of English stock. This name is an example of that slavish tendency, much in evidence during the centuries of Gaelic submergence whereby good old Gaelic Irish surnames were transmogrified into common English ones having more or less the same sound. In this case, so far as the majority of Harringtons are concerned, the anglicized form was only remotely similar to the original phonetically. Formerly Harrington was O'Hungerdell in English which was an approximate pronunciation of the Gaelic original O hIongardail, but the form O'Hungerdell, which is found in documents about the time when English came to be used for legal business, is now quite obsolete. As late as 1659 Ungerdell or Hungerdell was the form of this name in common use in Co. Cork. It appears thus in the "census" of that date among the principal Irish names in the barony of Kinalmeaky, in County Cork. The Harringtons of this sept are numerous in south-west Cork and Kerry - almost ninety per cent of the births registered for Harrington were from that area fifty years ago and a comparison with voters' lists and directories of to-day shows that this is still substantially the case. There are two other Gaelic surnames which are sometimes also anglicized as Harrington. On is O hOireachtaigh, properly anglicized as Hegarty, which belongs to Counties Galway and Mayo. The third is O hArrachtain, anglice Harraughton. This is recorded as a synonym or alias of Harrington in the Tralee-Dingle area of Kerry, which suggests that the Harringtons of that part are not of the main family of O hIongardail but migrants from the Hy Many country to which the minor sept of O hArrachtain belonged. However, Harrington may be regarded as essentially a West Cork name. There, at Castletownbere, was born Timothy Harrington (1851-1910), who was probably the best known Irishman of that name: he was secretary of the Land League, M.P. and Lord Mayor of Dublin. Harrington is to-day a very prominent name in the industrial life of cork City. Sir Henry Harrington, a leading figure in Elizabethan Ireland, was an Englishman.