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There were many problems involved in this formalising, often because Irish names were being recorded by non-speakers of the language:
1. some transcriptions became conventional:
Irish "buidhe" had first been transcribed as English "boy" in an age when the two words sounded the same: "boo-ee";
"gh" was used to transcribe the guttural Irish "ch" as in "Connacht", to distinguish it from the palatal/dental English "ch" as in "check".
2. some Irish words sounded quite different in different parts of Ireland:
Donegal Irish-speakers pronounced (and still pronounce) "knock" as "crock";
Irish "carraig" sometimes had a hard final sound "carrick" in the north, rarely in the south.
3. some Irish-speakers appear to have confused the transcribers:
official townland-name "Ballyruddelly" seems to transcribe the Irish for "something-else town"!
In this sort of situation, multiple spellings can arise from a single word. For example, it seems well accepted that the town Swords derives its name from Irish "sord" meaning pure, referring to a spring (dedicated in Christian times to Colmcille). Probably from exactly the same Irish word, the local river gained its name "Ward", and a nearby townland the first part of its name "Broadmeadow".
You don't even need two languages for such changes of spelling. A quiet English hamlet includes the attractively-named house "Upany Barn", whose owner said the name was taken from a nearby field. Research into documents of the early 1800s showed that the name given to the field when it was enclosed was "Upper New Field" - in a period of about 150 years, in a village of mostly literate people speaking the same language, prosaic "Upper New" had become poetic "Upany". Elsewhere in the same parish, the 1800s field-name "Shilpit Haines" (Scottish-English for "scalped (ie poor) enclosure") had become "Sherberdeans".
So don't be confused or purist about the spelling of names. Keep trying variations until you have as comprehensive a list of possibilities as your imagination can create. And keep a record of spellings you have tried, so that you don't have to start over if you return to the same name.