Owen Sheehy-Skeffington

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

Owen was brought up in Dublin. His father, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was a pacifist and nationalist whose murder by a British Army troops during the week of the Easter Rising became a cause celebre. His mother Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington was a founder of the Irish Women's Franchise League, and after her husband's murder she became incresaingly 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-denoninational school selected by his mother in the face of syrong criticism. His cousin, the diplomat, writer and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien, was a pupil there at the same time.

He later 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 at the 1965 election, 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, campigning for an end corporal punishment in Irish schools.[1]

In 1935, he 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". The resided at Hazelbrook Cottage, Rathfarnham, Dublin.