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Although members of the Clann Aodhagáin are on record as poets, clerics, and other professionals—note, for example, the Mac Aodhagáin contribution to the early seventeenth-century poetic contention Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh—the family is best known as the most influential of all the hereditary legal families of late medieval Ireland. The family produced both academic and practicing lawyers, in the latter case acting for the most prominent of the ruling families of Connacht and the adjacent midlands between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as the Meic Carthaig (MacCarthys) of Desmond. Clann Aodhagáin was widely dispersed with important seats at Baile Mhic Aodhagáin, “Mac Egan’s homestead” (anglicized Ballymacegan), at the northern end of Lough Derg in Ormond (north Tipperary); Dún Daighre (Duniry), between Loughrea and Portumna in southeast Galway; and Páirc (Park) near Dunmore in northeast Galway.