1728-1766; patriot priest, Clougheen, Co. Tipperary; b. Clonmel, ed. Santiago and Salamanca; ord. 1750; served in Waterford, then PP in Shanraghen and Templetenny; supported peasants against tithes extortion; accused of Whiteboy complicity, 1765 [DNB, executed on charge of complicity in the murder of the informer Bridges]; succeeded in having his case heard in King’s Bench, Dublin; acquitted; re-arrested for murder of informer called Bridge, convicted Clonmel on perjured evidence; executed by hanging, Clougheen, 15 March 1766; a monument was erected in Cougheen in 1991. DNB DIB
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Criticism
Mary Anne Sadleir, Fr Sheehy (1845); Philip O’Connell, ‘The
Plot against Father Nicholas Sheehy’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record
CVII, fifth ser., 1967, pp.372-84.
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Notes
Thomas Moore chose the day of Sheehy’s judical murder as the birthdate
of Captain Rock in Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824); see Seamus Deane,
Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790
(1997), p.67.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)