Jarlath of Tuam

Saint Jarlath of Tuam (in Irish Iarlaithe mac Loga) was a priest and scholar of Connacht in Ireland in the sixth century. He is honoured as the founder of the monastic school of Tuam and of the archdiocese of Tuam, of which he is the patron. The calendar also calls him founder of the monastery of Cluain Fois; according to another source, he was the first bishop of Tuam.

No medieval life of him survives; his memory comes from genealogies, martyrologies, the old Irish Lives of Saint Brendan of Clonfert and a biography compiled in the seventeenth century by John Colgan. The Irish genealogies know two saints named Jarlath: the son of Lugh, of Tuam, and the son of Trian, bishop of Armagh, and some scholars think they may be the same person.

In the Lives of Brendan, Brendan came to Connacht to study under Jarlath, famous for his wisdom. When Jarlath was old, Brendan advised him to set out in a new chariot and settle where its two hind shafts should break, for there would be the place of his resurrection and of many after him. The shafts broke at Tuaim dá Ghualann, "the mound of two shoulders", that is, at Tuam. Jarlath reposed "full of days" on 26 December, around 540, aged about ninety. He is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar on 6 June, as a saint of the West before the Great Schism (a saint of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.