He was a member of the well-known drinking club called The Monks of the Screw (or the Order of St. Patrick) founded by John Philpot Curran in about 1780.

[2] Though he is said to have owed his appointment to his friendship with John Fitzgibbon, 1st Earl of Clare, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, he was highly regarded as a judge.

The marriage was an unhappy one: both husband and wife had love affairs, and the judge fathered several illegitimate children, including John, who was mentioned in his half-brother Andrew's will.

According to a longstanding family tradition, the Guernsey-based portraitist Matthias Finucane (died 1810), who was Irish by birth, was another of the judge's illegitimate children.

[citation needed] The judge's only son Andrew had no issue, and on his death in 1843 the family estates passed to the heirs of his sister Susanna Macnamara, who had died in 1819.