On this day in 1766, Fr Nicholas Sheehy, parish priest in Clogheen, was hanged in Clonmel on a ‘trumped-up charge of murder.’
Born in Fethard and educated at Louvain, Sheehy was ordained a priest in Rome in 1752. Clogheen, where Fr Sheehy ministered, became a centre of Whiteboy activity in the early 1760s. The Whiteboys were an organised group of tenant farmers who fought against evictions, the rack rent system and against the payment of tithes to the established Protestant church.
Fr Sheehy felt a deep sense of outrage at injustices done to tenant-farmers and he advised his parishioners to withhold the payment of tithes. The inability of the Tipperary Grand Jury to obtain convictions for Whiteboy acts was a source of embarrassment to them. Sheehy was viewed by the authorities as a leader intent on raising rebellion.
Sheehy was indicted in 1763 and again in 1764 on various charges concerning rebellion but nothing came of them. Concerned that he would be taken into custody, Fr Sheehy fled to Limerick and in 1765 a reward of £300 was offered by the magistrate for his capture. He later surrendered voluntarily and stood trial in 1766 charged with incitement to riot and rebellion. He was acquitted and released. Dismayed at the outcome of the trial, his prosecutors ensured that he was re-arrested and charged with the murder of John Bridge in 1764.
At the trial, Sheehy’s defence team argued that they had an alibi for the priest’s location on the night of the murder and that none of the prosecution’s witnesses had any credibility. Nevertheless, Fr. Sheehy was found guilty on 12 March 1766 and was hanged on 15 March 1766 on a scaffold erected outside the County Gaol in Clonmel, just across the street from the entrance to the present SS Peter and Paul’s Church.
His body was later cut down, quartered and drawn through the streets of Clonmel before his head was severed and spiked on a pole in front of the prison where it remained for the next twenty years. In 1786, the skull was eventually given to his sister, who had it buried with his other remains in Shanrahan churchyard outside Clogheen.
Fr Sheehy maintained his innocence until the very end and claimed that the real murderers had been revealed to him in the confession box, information which by virtue of his clerical office he could not use in his own defence. In the words of local historian, Michael Ahern, ‘to say that the trial was a gross miscarriage of justice is an understatement…his execution was designed to subdue all protest and unrest and cower the peasantry into submission and compliance.’
In due course, Sheehy came to be regarded as a martyr of Catholic Ireland, the subject of poems and laments, and his grave became an object of pilgrimage.
Sources:
https://www.dib.ie/biography/sheehy-nicholas-a8031
Michael Ahern, Figures in a Clonmel Landscape (2006)
