Nicholas Sheehy

Father Nicholas Sheehy (1728–1766) was an 18th-century Irish Roman Catholic priest who was executed on the charge of being an accessory to murder.

Part of this concern stemmed from the emigration of Irish soldiers who had left for exile in France after the Treaty of Limerick, which is known as the Flight of the Wild Geese.

Nicholas Sheehy was born in Fethard, Ireland, near Clonmel[1] and grew up in a house near Newcastle on the Tipperary and Waterford border.

Sheehy often spoke out against the Penal Laws, the eviction of poor tenants by Anglo-Irish landlords, the elimination of common land by enclosure, and compulsory tithes even by impoverished Catholics to support the Established Protestant Church of Ireland's clergy.

[4] Similarly to the simultaneous Highland Clearances in Scotland, while labourers and small tenant farmers were evicted en masse, Anglo-Irish landlords replaced them with more profitable herds of cattle.

Initially, their activities were limited to specific grievances and the tactics used non-violent, such as knocking down fences and the levelling of ditches constructed for the enclosure of common grazing land,[5] but as their numbers increased and the State's response escalated, so did the violence and vigilantism, including well documented cases of the torture and assassination of those who violated the code of silence.

He was arrested for sedition for his supposed involvement in the Whiteboys' destruction of a wall intended to enclose commonly held land near Clogheen.

The judge Richard Clayton had the reputation of an honest and humane man, but he had arrived in Ireland only the previous year and seems to have been quite unaware of the political background to the trial.

[8] The evidence was widely considered as fabricated by local Anglo-Irish landowners and the Church of Ireland Vicar of Clogheen, County Tipperary.

Although the judge was later much criticised for his conduct of the trial, it has been argued that his summing up speech was actually favourable to the accused and advising the jury to return with an acquittal.

Sheehy's defence attorney, on hearing the verdict and sentence of death, addressed the court, "If there is any justice in heaven, you will die roaring.

[11] His trial and execution inflamed and polarised Irish nationalist opinion, and had a great effect on the efforts of his cousin, Edmund Burke, to push for Catholic Emancipation.