Fionán Lynch

Fionán Lynch (Irish: Fionán Ó Loingsigh; 17 March 1889 – 3 June 1966) was an Irish revolutionary, barrister, politician and judge.

Fionán Lynch was born on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1889 in Cahersiveen, County Kerry. He was the seventh of eleven children to his parents Finian Lynch and Ellie McCarthy, the master and mistress of the new national school in the townland of Kilmakerrin, near Cahersiveen, in County Kerry.

Fionán’s father, Finian Lynch, was the younger son of Partalan Lynch, a stonemason, farmer and hedge school teacher, who had purchased some land from the O’Connell estate at Kenneigh in Kerry, between Cahersiveen and Waterville on the Ballinskelligs side of the road and north of the river Inny. He was born in 1849. His elder brother became a stonemason but Finian trained as a teacher in Dublin. His mother, Ellie McCarthy was the daughter of the teachers in the national school at Spunkane, east of the road between Cahersiveen and Waterville and nearer to Waterville. She was born in 1853 and went to Dublin to train as a teacher.

Fionán grew up bi-lingual, speaking mostly in Irish at home, but in English at school. He was initially educated in the parent’s school in Kilmakerrin but subsequently went to St Brendan’s College in Killarney and then, at the age of 14 in about September 1903, to the Holy Ghost Fathers School at Rockwell College College, Tipperary. In 1907 he finished for one year with the Holy Ghost Fathers in Blackrock College, Dublin. He had planned to study medicine, but in 1907, when he was 18 years old his father died and he did not have the money to pursue this career path.

Instead, when he was 18, he went to Swansea in Wales and taught in a parish school, not as a trained teacher, but as a well-educated young man, before returning to Ireland in 1909, where he started training as a teacher in Saint Patrick’s Teacher Training College, Drumcondra in North Dublin. He graduated in 1911 as a primary school teacher and took up a teaching position in Dublin in April 1912 in St. Michan's School, Halston Street near North King Street, Dublin, by chance, within the area of his activity in 1916.

While in training he met and became a lifelong friend of Gearóid O'Sullivan, a fellow student from Skibbereen in County Cork. Both having got jobs in Dublin, they arranged to stay at "Grianan na nGaedheal", 44 Mountjoy Street, Dublin, the hotel and lodgings run by his aunt Miss Myra McCarthy.

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