[2] The second son of Henry Morgan Dockrell, he was born on 6 October 1908 at 1 Herbert Park, Dublin.
He stood for Dublin South-Central at the 1977 general election but lost his seat in the Fianna Fáil landslide of that year.
[5] During his term of office he raised the hackles of some Protestants when, in a gesture of ecumenism, he kissed the ring of the papal legate to the Patrician celebrations in June 1961.
Always keen to build bridges between Ireland and Britain, he paid an official visit to London in June 1961, when he laid a wreath at The Cenotaph, a gesture later described in his Times obituary as 'an act of piety that involved some political risk'.
His grandson Maurice Dockrell was co-opted onto Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council in 2020,[6] making him the fifth generation of the family to serve either at national or local level.