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Tag Archives: Eugene Sheehy (priest)


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Death of David Sheehy, Irish Nationalist Politician

David Sheehy, Irish nationalist politician, dies in Dublin on December 17, 1932. He is a member of parliament (MP) from 1885 to 1900 and from 1903 to 1918, taking his seat as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Born in Limerick in 1844, Sheehy is the son of Richard Sheehy and Johanna Shea, and is the brother of Mary Sheehy and Fr. Eugene Sheehy. He is a student for the priesthood at the Irish College in Paris, but leaves due to a cholera epidemic and later marries Bessie McCoy. In his youth he is a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and is active in the Irish National Land League. He is imprisoned on six occasions for his part in the Land War.

At the 1885 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, Sheehy is elected unopposed as MP for South Galway and holds that seat until the 1900 United Kingdom general election in Ireland. His re-election in Galway is unopposed in 1886 and 1895. When the Irish Party splits over the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, he joins the anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation majority. At the 1892 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, he is opposed by a Parnellite Irish National League candidate, whom he defeats with a majority of nearly two to one. In the same election he stands in Waterford City, but fails to unseat the Parnellite John Redmond.

The two factions of the Irish Parliamentary Party reunite for the general election in 1900, but Sheehy does not stand again and is out of parliament for the next three years. After the death in August 1903 of James Laurence Carew, the Independent Nationalist MP for South Meath, he is selected as the Irish Parliamentary Party candidate in the resulting by-election in October 1903. Carew had allegedly been elected in 1900 as a result of a series of errors in nominations, and his predecessor John Howard Parnell stands again, this time as an Independent Nationalist. Sheehy wins with a majority of more than two to one, and holds the seat until he stands down at the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland.

Sheehy and his wife, Bessie, have seven children, of whom six survive to adulthood. One of his daughters, Mary (born 1884), marries the MP Tom Kettle and has one daughter, Betty (1913–1996). Hanna (born 1877), becomes a teacher and marries the writer Francis Skeffington. They have one son, Owen, who is seven years old when his father is murdered by the Captain Bowen-Colthurst in Portobello Barracks, Rathmines, during the 1916 Easter Rising. Kathleen marries Freeman’s Journal and Irish Independent journalist Frank Cruise O’Brien. The contrarian politician and writer Conor Cruise O’Brien is their son. Margaret (born 1879), an elocutionist, actress and playwright, marries solicitor Frank Culhane. They have four children. After his death she marries her godson, the poet Michael Casey. Sheehy’s two sons, Richard and Eugene, are barristers.

The writer James Joyce, who lives nearby as a youth, often visits the family home, 2 Belvedere Place, where musical evenings and theatricals take place every Sunday evening. Joyce entertains the family with Italian songs. In 1900, Margaret writes a play in which the Sheehys and their friends, including Joyce, act. Joyce takes a particular liking to Eugene and has a long-lasting but unrequited crush on Mary. Joyce’s novel Ulysses wittily describes an encounter between Sheehy’s wife, Bessie, and Father John Conmee, SJ, rector of Clongowes Wood College. Their daughter Mary is the spéirbhean longingly pursued by the protagonist in the story “Araby” in Joyce’s collection Dubliners. Another daughter, Kathleen, is possibly the model for the mockingly nationalist Miss Ivors in the story “The Dead“, which concludes Dubliners.

When Sheehy dies at the age of 88 in Dublin on December 17, 1932, it is reported that he has been the oldest surviving member of the Irish Parliamentary Party.


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Irish National Land League Outlawed by the British Government

The Irish National Land League, also known as the Land League, is outlawed by the British government on October 20, 1881. From the start, the League is a thorn in the side of the government of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.

The Irish National Land League is an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which organises tenant farmers in their resistance to exactions of landowners. Its primary aim is to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they work on. The period of the Land League’s agitation is known as the Land War.

The Irish National Land League is founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, County Mayo, on October 21, 1879. At that meeting Charles Stewart Parnell, the prominent Home Rule Member of Parliament, is elected president of the league. Andrew Kettle, Michael Davitt and Thomas Brennan are appointed as honorary secretaries. This unites practically in a single organisation all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements on the nationalist side of the increasingly frozen sectarian-political divide in Ireland. 

The government had introduced the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, the first Land Act, which proves largely ineffective. It is followed by further marginally more effective Irish Land Acts of 1880 and 1881. These establish the Irish Land Commission that starts to reduce some rents. The passage of the second Land Act in 1881 fails to mollify many of the leaders of the Land League, mainly due to the fact that close to 300,000 tenants behind in their rents are excluded from its benefits. Parnell together with all of his party lieutenants, including Father Eugene Sheehy, known as “the Land League priest,” go into a bitter verbal offensive.

William Ewart Gladstone has them arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act for “sabotaging the Land Act,” from where the No Rent Manifesto is issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until “constitutional liberties” are restored, and the prisoners freed. It has a modest success In Ireland and mobilizes financial and political support from the Irish diaspora. Many other leaders of the League, including Michael Davitt, whose name is added to the bottom of the document by others, and other moderate elements in Ireland oppose this move.

Perhaps sensing weakness in the League organization, the government outlaws the League on October 20, 1881, but the work of the League is then continued by the Ladies’ Land League, which had been founded earlier by Parnell’s sister Anna. In 1882, Parnell is released from jail after reaching a written compact with the government, which extends the benefits of the Land Act to those excluded earlier, while Parnell pledges to help end land-agitation violence in Ireland and cooperate with Gladstone’s Liberal party.

In October 1882, Parnell forms the Irish National League, replacing the Land League. The Land League passes into history, but it has helped show Irish peasants that if they all stand together there is strength in numbers.

(Pictured: Irish land League poster dating from the 1880s)


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Founding of the Irish National Land League

land-league-poster

The Irish National Land League, one of the most important political organizations in Irish history which seeks to help poor tenant farmers, is founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, County Mayo, on October 21, 1879. Its primary aim is to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they work on. The national organization is modeled on the Land League of Mayo, which Michael Davitt had helped found earlier in the year.

At the founding meeting Charles Stewart Parnell is elected president of the league. Davitt, Andrew Kettle, and Thomas Brennan are appointed as honorary secretaries. This unites practically all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements under a single organisation.

Parnell, Davitt, John Dillon, and others including Cal Lynn then go to the United States to raise funds for the League with spectacular results. Branches are also set up in Scotland, where the Crofters Party imitates the League and secures a reforming Act in 1886.

The government introduces the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, which proves largely ineffective. It is followed by the marginally more effective Land Acts of 1880 and 1881. These establish a Land Commission that starts to reduce some rents. Parnell together with all of his party lieutenants including Father Eugene Sheehy, known as “the Land League priest,” go into a bitter verbal offensive and are imprisoned in October 1881 under the Protection of Person and Property Act 1881 in Kilmainham Gaol for “sabotaging the Land Act.” It is from here that the No-Rent Manifesto is issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until “constitutional liberties” are restored and the prisoners freed. It has a modest success In Ireland and mobilizes financial and political support from the Irish Diaspora.

Although the League discourages violence, agrarian crimes increase widely. Typically, a rent strike is followed by eviction by the police and the bailiffs. Tenants who continue to pay the rent can be subject to a boycott by local League members. Where cases go to court, witnesses would change their stories, resulting in an unworkable legal system. This in turn leads on to stronger criminal laws being passed that are described by the League as “Coercion Acts.”

The bitterness that develops helps Parnell later in his Home Rule campaign. Davitt’s views as seen in his famous slogan: “The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland” is aimed at strengthening the hold on the land by the peasant Irish at the expense of the alien landowners. Parnell aims to harness the emotive element, but he and his party are strictly constitutional. He envisions tenant farmers as potential freeholders of the land they have rented.


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Birth of Activist & Feminist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington

hanna-sheehy-skeffington

Johanna Mary “Hanna” Sheehy-Skeffington, Republican activist and feminist, is born in Kanturk, County Cork, on May 24, 1877.

Sheehy is the eldest daughter of Elizabeth McCoy and David Sheehy, an ex-Fenian and Member of Parliament (MP) for the Irish Parliamentary Party, representing South Galway. One of her uncles, Father Eugene Sheehy, is known as the Land League Priest, and his activities land him in prison. He is also one of Éamon de Valera‘s teachers in Limerick. When Hanna’s father becomes an MP in 1887, the family moves to Drumcondra, Dublin.

Sheehy is educated at the Dominican Convent on Eccles Street, where she is a prize-winning pupil. She then enrolls at St. Mary’s University College, a third level college for women established by the Dominicans in 1893, to study modern French and German. She sits for examinations at Royal University of Ireland and receives a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1899, and a Master of Arts Degree with first-class honours in 1902. This leads to a career as a teacher in Eccles Street and an examiner in the Intermediate Certificate examination.

Sheehy marries Francis Skeffington in 1903, and they both take the surname Sheehy Skeffington, which they do not hyphenate but use as a double name. In 1908, they found the Irish Women’s Franchise League, a group aiming for women’s voting rights.

Sheehy-Skeffington gets into numerous scuffles with the law. She is jailed in 1912 for breaking windows of government buildings in support of suffrage as part of an IWFL campaign. That same year she also throws a hatchet at visiting British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. She loses her teaching job in 1913 when she is arrested and imprisoned for three months after throwing stones at Dublin Castle and assaulting a police officer in a feminist action. While in jail she goes on hunger strike and is released under the Prisoner’s Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act but is soon rearrested.

Being free from her teaching job enables Sheehy-Skeffington to devote more time to the fight for suffrage. She is influenced by James Connolly and during the 1913 lock-out works with other suffragists in Liberty Hall, providing food for the families of the strikers.

She strongly opposes participation in World War I which breaks out in August 1914 and is prevented by the British government from attending the International Congress of Women held in The Hague in April 1915. The following June her husband is imprisoned for anti-recruiting activities. He is later shot dead during the 1916 Easter Rising after having been arrested by British soldiers.

Sheehy-Skeffington refuses compensation for her husband’s death, which is offered on condition of her ceasing to speak and write about the murder. Rather, she travels to the United States to publicise the political situation in Ireland. In October 1917, she is the sole Irish representative to League for Small and Subject Nationalities where, along with several other contributors, she is accused of pro-German sympathies. She publishes British Militarism as I Have Known It, which is banned in the United Kingdom until after the World War I. Upon her return to Britain she is once again imprisoned, this time in Holloway prison. After release, Sheehy-Skeffington attends the 1918 Irish Race Convention in New York City and later supports the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish Civil War.

In 1926, Sheehy-Skeffington becomes a founding member of Fianna Fáil and is elected to the party’s Ard Comhairle. During the 1930s, she is assistant editor of An Phoblacht. In January 1933, she is arrested in Newry for breaching an exclusion order banning her from Northern Ireland. At her trial she says, “I recognize no partition. I recognize it as no crime to be in my own country. I would be ashamed of my own name and my murdered husband’s name if I did…Long live the Republic!” She is sentenced to a month’s imprisonment.

Sheehy-Skeffington is a founding member of the Irish Women Workers’ Union and an author whose works deeply oppose British imperialism in Ireland. Her son, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, becomes a politician and Irish Senator.

Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington dies in Dublin on April 20, 1946, at the age of 68 and is buried with her husband in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.