Thus wrote the Irish poet Tadhg Ó Neachtain of Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín, a leading evangelist of a literary tradition which Breandán Ó Buachalla made his own over a fifty-year academic career. The metaphor is appropriate because Ó Buachalla towered like an enormous oak over Irish studies. Tháinig Breandán ar an tsaoil i gCorcaigh ar 15 Eanáir 1936, an cathairina bhfuair sé a bhunoideachas agus a mheánoideachas. Bronnadh BA agus MA sa Léann Ceilteach air (1957–8) ó Choláiste na hOllscoile, Corcaigh. Chaith sé seal mar léachtóir le Gaeilge i mBéal Feirste, áit inár chuir sé spéis in oidhreacht liteartha Chúige Uladh san 18ú haois. Over the next decade he catalogued Irish manuscripts in Belfast Public Library (1962), edited the poems and songs of Peadar Ó Doirnín (1969) and Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Gunna (1969) and wrote his paradigmshifting monograph I mBéal Feirste cois cuain (1968), which showed how the Presbyterians of late eighteenth-century Belfast had rescued the Irish language.

As well as immersing himself in the literary heritage of south Ulster, he regularly traversed a region blighted by partition. In an illuminating, early 1990s interview in Urney Cemetery, which nestled under the British army barracks that dominated Sliabhg Cuilinn, Ó Buachalla spoke of a living literary tradition which could be traced back through the poets of south Ulster to Cúchulainn.