The son of pacifists, feminists and socialists Francis and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, he was politically likeminded and as a member of the Irish Senate was praised as a defender of civil liberty, democracy, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, women's rights, minority rights and many other liberal values.

His father, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, was a pacifist, feminist and socialist whose execution by firing squad, on the orders of Captain J.C. Bowen-Colthurst, during the week of the Easter Rising in 1916, became a cause célèbre.

[2] As a three-year-old, Francis had taken Owen to see his mother while she was incarcerated at Mountjoy Prison, having been sentenced to two months imprisonment for her actions in defence of women's rights.

[2] In 1927 he enrolled in Trinity College Dublin, where besides his studies in English and French he excelled in the university's debating society, created several new student organisations and publications, and developed a reputation for activism.

[2] In the following two years he moved to Paris, where he was a graduate assistant at the École Normale Supérieure, allowing him to renew contact with Samuel Beckett, whose lectures he had attended at Trinity, and to meet James Joyce who had been a contemporary and friend of his father at University College.

The Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter suggests he was expelled for engaging in a public spat with a Catholic priest over the nature of socialism.

[8] Other sources suggest communists in Dublin, who had entered the Labour Party under the doctrine of entryism, had ousted him because they perceived him to be veering towards Trotskyism.

Sheehy-Skeffington encouraged Tyrrell to write his autobiography, which was published posthumously and helped to expose the brutal conditions in Irish Industrial schools, and in Letterfrack in particular.

Leader of the Seanad Thomas Mullins paid tribute to Sheehy-Skeffington, stating: A man of strong humanist and liberal beliefs he was a central figure in many public controversies.

He was never dismayed if his point of view was a minority one and indeed seemed at times to revel in a position of isolation....The range of his interests was wide and he employed his qualities of wit and irony to lend force and cogency to his arguments.

In Senator Sheehy Skeffington we have lost a colleague whose gifts of intelligence, courage and humanity were widely appreciated and whose passing will be keenly felt.

[1]Professor George Dawson, chair of Trinity College’s academic staff association, said of him: Owen Sheehy Skeffington believed in the equality of men: he argued incisively against privilege and discrimination.

As a member of the committee of the Academic Staff Association in Trinity and of the Council of the Irish Federation of University Teachers, his careful mind frequently disturbed our prejudices and persuaded us to clear decisions.