His mother was of the same family as Baron Garvagh and the statesman George Canning, and his father, through his grandmother Frances Fitzgerald, was a distant cousin of the Earl of Kildare.
[2] He was ordained on 15 November 1753 and began his ecclesiastical career with a curacy at his father's church, St Mary, Shandon.
After another curacy at Ballymoney he held livings at Kinneagh, Kilmaloda, Tullagh, Creagh.
[3] He was Vicar choral of Cork Cathedral from 1778 to 1781;[4] and Prebendary of Dromdaleague in 1781.
Fitzgerald was murdered by robbers in 1809 on the road between Bantry and Kenmare.