Ó Cobhthaigh is a Gaelic-Irish surname, generally anglicised as Coffey, Cofer, Coffer, Copher,, Caughey, Coffee, Coffie, Coughey, Cauffey, Cauffy, Cauffie, Coffy, Coughay, Coffay, Coffeye, Couhig and many more.
Ó Cobhthaigh was the name of an Irish Brehon family from County Westmeath and County Longford. They were known as the chief ollamhs or filí of Uisneach, where there is a Tuar Uí Cobhthaigh, Toorcoffey (Coffey's Tower).
"There are several families in Ireland who derive their surnames from the hereditary professions of their ancestors, and especially of the bardic order......Thus we find in several passages in the Annals (of the Four Masters) that the O'Coffeys, O'Higgins, and O'Dalys were chief professors of poetry over the schools of Ireland ; and many of those assumed the title of chief professors of the men of Ireland and Scotland, in Brehonism, Bardism, Minstrelsy etc" Transaction of the Ossianic Society 1860
The Annals of the Four Masters record the deaths of members of the family in 1415 and 1452. In 1546 Tadhg Ó Cobhthaigh, called ‘chief preceptor of Ireland and Scotland in poetry’, was arrested by the Dublin administration ‘for his attachment to the Irish’, ‘and confined for eighteen weeks in the King's castle’. It was ‘intended that he should be put to death’, but he managed to escape. He died in 1554. Another member of the family, Uaithne, son of Uilliam Ó Cobhthaigh, ‘the most learned in Ireland in poetry’, ‘was treacherously slain at night [along with his wife] . . . but it is not known by whom’.
The poem beginning "Irish: Dá néll orchra os iath Uisnigh" (Two clouds of woe over Uisneach's land), which is 150 verses long, deals with the murder of the poet Uaithne Ó Cobhthaigh and his wife in 1556
There were at least three other families of the name, located in the regions of Limerick-Kerry, Down, west Cork, and Galway.
Acclaimed celtic scholar Kuno Meyer named at least two O'Cobhthaighs in his list of irish poets (filidh) over the past 2000 years. Some scholars point to this being evidence of a heritary druidic lineage.
Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh preserved an Ó Cobhthaigh genealogy in Leabhar na nGenealach:
A genealogy on pp. 660–61 picks up from Fearghus mac Oilill: Fearghusa m. Ailealla m. Mec-Rithe m. Conaill Claoín m. Gearain m. Duach tracing the family back to Íoth mac Breogán.
According to historian C. Thomas Cairney, the O'Coffeys were chiefly a family of the Corca Laoghdne who in turn came from the Erainn who were the second wave of Celts who settled in Ireland from 500 to 100 BC.[1]
According to John O'Hart, Pedigrees of the Irish Nation, the O'Cobhthaigh are descendents of the Line of Ith or Ithe.