Gerard A. Hayes-McCoy (1911–1975) was an Irish historian regarded as one of the leading Irish historians of his generation. Life Family Gerard Anthony Hayes-McCoy was born in Galway on 15 August 1911, of Thomas Hayes-McCoy and Mary Kathleen Hayes-McCoy (née Wallace). His grandfather Thomas Hayes-McCoy had been a Dubliner who as a child came to Galway in 1834; he was later a well-known Parnellite. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Burke, had been a Galway artist. Hayes-McCoy grew up on Eyre Square where his father ran a gentleman's hairdressing business. His two older siblings were Ignatius and Marguerite; the latter also received a PhD-degree in History at University College Galway, and later taught at the Galway Technical School. Education Hayes-McCoy received his early education from the Patrician Brothers, Galway. His earliest notebook of 1927 and a manuscript history of Poland of the same year, now at the National Library of Ireland, testify to an early interest in history and heritage. From 1928 to 1932 he was a student scholarship holder at University College Galway, graduating in 1932 with a Bachelor of Commerce, and a Bachelor of Arts, with first-class honours in both, and a specialisation in "History, Ethics, Politics" for the latter. Mary Donovan O'Sullivan was one of his professors of history, and Liam Ó Briain, professor of Romance languages, was a stimulating influence. At this time Hayes-McCoy was a member of the Republican Club, a committee member of the Literary and Debating Society, and in 1931 he was one of the founding members of a new Irish Students' Association. Hayes-McCoy pursued his PhD at the University of Edinburgh (conferred July 1934), and then spent two years at the Institute of Historical Research, London, in the Tudor seminar of J.E.Neale, rewriting his PhD and eventually publishing it as Scots mercenary forces in Ireland, 1565–1603 (Dublin and London, 1937), with a foreword by Eoin MacNeill. This was characterised by meticulous archival research, and it anticipated by sixty years the much vaunted New British History of the late twentieth century by tracing the interconnections between events in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Career In the absence of an academic post, Hayes-McCoy became an assistant keeper in the Art and Industrial Division at the National Museum of Ireland (1939–1959), with a responsibility for the Military History, and the War of Independence collections. One of his first tasks was to prepare a standing exhibition on Irish history