Francis Sheehy-Skeffington
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Francis Skeffington (1878 – 26 April, 1916) from Bailieborough, County Cavan, was an Irish suffragist and pacifist. He was a friend and schoolmate of James Joyce, Oliver St John Gogarty, Tom Kettle, and Conor Cruise O'Brien's father, Frank O'Brien, at the Jesuit school at St Stephen's Green, Dublin.
He was married to one of Conor Cruise O'Brien's aunts, the former Hanna Sheehy, whose own surname he adopted as part of his name, resulting in his being known as Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and sometimes referred to as "Skeffy".
During the week of the Easter Rising, Sheehy-Skeffington, discouraged at the widespread looting that had erupted after the police abandoned Dublin, attempted to form a civil defense organization in an effort to restore order to the city. Though, as a pacifist, he took no role in the Rising, he was arrested by members of the British 11th East Surrey Regiment, and, after admitting to having sympathy for the insurgents' cause (but not their tactics), he was held as an enemy sympathizer.
On Wednesday, 26 April, 1916, he was murdered on the orders of an Irish-born British officer, Colonel Bowen-Colthurst. As Bowen-Colthurst sought out "Fenians", he took captive a young boy, two pro-British journalists — Thomas Dixon and Patrick McIntyre — and a Sinn Féin politician, Richard O'Carroll, all of whom he also had killed. Bowen-Colthurst was adjudged insane after committing these murders, and was sent to Broadmoor briefly and then to a hospital in Canada, but was eventually released with a pension. Sheehy-Skeffington's wife was offered financial compensation by the British government of the day but she refused this.
Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was survived by his wife, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, who became increasingly nationalist-minded, and his son, the now-deceased Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, who eventually played a moderate role in Irish politics and attended the secular Sandford Park School with his cousin, Conor Cruise O'Brien, because Hanna refused to send her son to any school with a pro-Treaty ethos.
Although he was born a Roman Catholic, he fairly soon in life identified himself as an atheist.
References
- Max Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion, Dublin 1916
External links
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