 In spite of his luckless life, Eoghan Rua was well-beloved and legendary in his own time, and his songs and poems have passed down in the Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking regions, of Munster, by word of mouth right up until the present day.Yeats used aspects of Ó Súilleabháin's reputation in his stories of Red Hanrahan, his invented alter ego, whose given name is "Owen," who carries a copy of Virgil in his pocket, "the hedge schoolmaster, a tall, strong, red-haired young man.