Owen Lancelot Sheehy-Skeffington (19 May 1909 – 7 June 1970) was an Irish university lecturer and senator. The son of pacifists, feminists and socialists Francis and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, he was politically likeminded and as a member of the Irish Senate was praised as a defender of civil liberty, Democracy, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, women's rights, minority rights and many other liberal values.
Early life
Sheehy-Skeffington was brought up in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, was a Pacifist, Feminist and Socialist whose execution 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 was the suffragette Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington who founded the Irish Women's Franchise League. His maternal grandfather was David Sheehy, a longstanding member of Parliament for the Irish Parliamentary Party.
As a three-year-old, Francis had taken Owen to see his mother while she was incarcerated at Mountjoy Prison, having been sentenced to two months imprisonment for her actions in defence of women's rights. At five years old he was taken by Hanna to see Francis while he was incarcerated at Mountjoy because of his campaign against conscription during World War I.
After her husband's execution, Hanna became increasingly Republican, supporting the anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War and Republican and Socialist causes long thereafter.
Through his childhood, Sheehy-Skeffington circulated through a number of prestigious schools, including time spent at Boyland School in Santa Barbara, California 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 Republican friends. His cousin, the diplomat, writer and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien, was a pupil there at the same time. His mother deliberately chose schools viewed as socially progressive for Owen, something that instilled in him lifelong values.
In 1927 he enrolled in Trinity College Dublin, where besides his studies in English and French he excelled in the university's debating society, created several new student organisations and publications, and developed a reputation for activism. He graduated in 1931 as a first-class honours Bachelor of the Arts in English and French.
Academic career and adult life
In the following two years he moved to Paris, where he was a graduate assistant at the École Normale Supérieure, allowing him to renew contact with Samuel Beckett, whose lectures he had attended at Trinity, and to meet James Joyce who had been a contemporary and friend of his father at University College. It was around this time that he began his doctoral studies studying the work of l'Abbaye de Créteil, which he later converted into a thesis on the work of ‘Jules Romains, the Apostle of Unanimisme’, for which he was awarded a PhD at Trinity in 1935.
It was also in 1935 that Sheehy-Skeffington married Andrée Denis, a French graduate of the Sorbonne and a daughter of friends of his parents from Amiens. It was at Amiens Town Hall the two were wed on 23 March. The early years of their marriage were rough; they survived on Owen's low paid salary as a junior academic at Trinity back in Ireland, and both their relationship and his career was interrupted by Owen suffering a collapsed lung which required him to sojourn to Switzerland for specialist treatment in 1937 and 1938. However, by 1939 Owen was able to resume work at Trinity, becoming a lecturer in French.
Like her husband, Andrée Sheehy-Skeffington was a socially-involved campaigner and an active member of the Irish Housewives Association. She later wrote a biography of her husband, Skeff: A Life of Owen Sheehy Skeffington, 1909–1970. They resided at Hazelbrook Cottage, Terenure, Dublin. The couple had three children together, two boys and a girl: Francis Eugene, born in 1945, Alan Richard Louis, born in 1947 and Micheline Joan, born in 1953.