Ímar mac Arailt

Ímar mac Arailt
King of Dublin
Ímar's name it appears on folio 17r of Oxford Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson B 488 (the Annals of Tigernach): "h-Imar mac Arailt".
Reign	1038–1046
Predecessor	Echmarcach mac Ragnaill
Successor	Echmarcach mac Ragnaill
Died	1054
House	Uí Ímair
Father	Aralt mac Amlaíb

Ímar mac Arailt (died 1054) was an eleventh-century ruler of the Kingdom of Dublin and perhaps the Kingdom of the Isles. He was the son of a man named Aralt, and appears to have been a grandson of Amlaíb Cuarán, King of Northumbria and Dublin. Such a relationship would have meant that Ímar was a member of the Uí Ímair, and that he was a nephew of Amlaíb Cuarán's son, Sitriuc mac Amlaíb, King of Dublin, a man driven from Dublin by Echmarcach mac Ragnaill in 1036.

Ímar's reign in Dublin spanned at least eight years, from 1038 to 1046. Although he began by seizing the kingship from Echmarcach in 1038, he eventually lost it to him in 1046. As king, Ímar is recorded to have overseen military operations throughout Ireland, and seems to have actively assisted the family of Iago ab Idwal ap Meurig, King of Gwynedd overseas in Wales. After Echmarcach's final expulsion from Dublin 1052, Ímar may well have been reinstalled as King of Dublin by Diarmait mac Maíl na mBó, King of Leinster. Whatever the case, Ímar died in 1054. He may have been an ancestor or close kinsman of Gofraid Crobán, King of Dublin and the Isles, the progenitor of a family that ruled in the Isles until the mid thirteenth century.

Ímar was probably the son of Aralt mac Amlaíb (died 999), a man whose death at the Battle of Glenn Máma is recorded by the seventeenth-century texts Annals of Clonmacnoise and Annals of the Four Masters, the fifteenth–sixteenth-century Annals of Ulster, and the twelfth-century Chronicon Scotorum. If this identification is correct, Ímar's paternal grandfather would have been Amlaíb Cuarán, King of Northumbria and Dublin (died 980/981), and a paternal uncle of Ímar would have been Sitriuc mac Amlaíb, King of Dublin (died 1042).