[2][3] Blythe was born to a Church of Ireland and unionist family in the townland of Magheraliskmisk, Maghaberry, County Antrim, in 1889.

[7][8] He also joined Conradh na Gaeilge, where his first Irish teacher was Sinéad Flanagan, the future wife of Éamon de Valera.

[9] To improve his knowledge of the Irish language, he went to the County Kerry Gaeltacht where he worked as an agricultural labourer to earn his keep.

[11] Blythe was regularly arrested 1913-15 under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, when he was finally ordered to be deported from Ireland in July 1915:[citation needed] some of the others on the writ were Liam Mellows, Herbert Pim, and Denis McCullough.

On 30 March 1916, a large crowd assembled outside the Mansion House in Dublin to protest against Blythe's and Mellows's deportation.

He then failed to report to police and was sent to Oxford Prison, Blythe was unable to participate in the Easter Rising due to his imprisonment there.

He ignored a (British Army) court martial to leave Munster, which resulted in a 12 months imprisonment in Dundalk and Belfast.

Blythe first became involved in electoral politics in 1918 when Sinn Féin won the general election of 1918 and he became a TD for Monaghan North.

We must decide that in our resistance we shall acknowledge no limit and no scruple ... [man who] assists directly or by connivance in this crime against us should be killed without mercy or hesitation....

Instead a war of words emerged in which single issues, like conscription, would serve cohere to a general desire for Irish cultural identity and separation.

Until 2014 when Heather Humphreys was appointed as a Minister, he was the "only specifically northern protestant to have served at cabinet level in the 26 County state.

Despite his austerity policies in relation to the old and the poor, Blythe readily funded pet projects; in just one year, 1929, his Department of Finance allocated £6,400 – a huge sum at the time – for translation into Irish of novels including Dracula by Bram Stoker.

[17] In 1930 he wrote in the Star whether "the gods of democracy have not feet of clay ... the franchise in the hands of an ignorant and foolish populace is a menace to the country".

[18] Cumann na nGaedheal had a very conservative economic policy at the start of the 1930s, seeing their role as running a tight financial ship, facilitating trade, and not intervening in the economy.

[23] In January 1934, Blythe was elected to fill a vacancy in the Senate created by the death of Ellen Cuffe, Countess of Desart.

In the 1940s a fascist and anti-Semitic party called Ailtirí na hAiséirghe was formed, led by Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin, which Blythe supported.

He advised Ó Cuinneagáin on the drafting of the party's constitution, gave it backing in his journal The Leader, as well as making financial contributions.

[26] During The Emergency in Ireland during World War II Blythe was of concern to the G2 whose intelligence files referred to him as a potential "Irish Quisling".

[28] It was said that he rejected many good plays in favour of those which were more financially rewarding and ran the theatre into the ground as a creative force.

Most people in Ireland are the habituees of farmhouse kitchens, city tenements or middle-class sitting-rooms and their loves and hates, disappointments and triumphs, griefs and joys, are just as interesting and amusing, or as touching, as those of, shall we say alliteratively, denizens of ducal drawing-rooms, or boozers in denizened brothels".

Blythe opposed coercion as a method of achieving a united Ireland: "Partitionist practitioners of violence do more to keep Partition in being than the most extreme section of orangemen".

He published three volumes of autobiography: Trasna na Bóinne (1957), Slán le hUltaibh (1969) and Gaeil á Múscailt (1973).