Owen Sheehy-Skeffington

Owen Lancelot Sheehy-Skeffington (19 May 1909 – 7 June 1970) was an Irish university lecturer and senator.

Sheehy-Skeffington was brought up in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, was a pacifist and nationalist whose murder by firing squad, on the orders of Captain J.C. Bowen-Colthurst, during the week of the Easter Rising in 1916, became a cause célèbre. His mother, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, was a founder of the Irish Women's Franchise League. After her husband's murder she became increasingly nationalist, supporting the anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War.

He was educated in the United States and in Dublin, at Sandford Park School, a non-denominational school selected by his mother in the face of strong criticism from her Catholic and nationalist friends. His cousin, the diplomat, writer and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien, was a pupil there at the same time.

In 1935 Sheehy-Skeffington married Andrée Denis, a French graduate of the Sorbonne, with whom he had two sons and one daughter. She later wrote a biography of her husband, Skeff: A Life of Owen Sheehy Skeffington, 1909-1970. They resided at Hazelbrook Cottage, Rathfarnham, Dublin.

Sheehy-Skeffington became a lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was elected in 1954 as a member of the 8th Seanad Éireann by the Dublin University constituency. He was re-elected in 1957, but lost his seat in 1961. He was returned to the 11th Seanad in 1965 and was re-elected for a final time in 1969. In the Seanad he was known as a champion of human rights and an opponent of authoritarianism, and campaigned for an end to corporal punishment in Irish schools.[1]

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