Seán Cromien

Seán Patrick Cromien was an Irish senior civil servant who served as secretary general of the Department of Finance and Director of the National Library of Ireland.

[4] John was killed in the 1916 Easter Rising by a stray bullet that hit him as he walked down Prussia Street on his way to meet with his Irish Volunteer Company.

Throughout his career, Cromien worked to ensure that the Department of Finance created and enacted policy that would serve the public good.

In his role as General Secretary, and as a member of An Bord Snip, Cromien fought off the recession through strategic budget cuts.

Following his retirement from the Department of Finance in 1994, Cromien remained an active public servant, taking on a variety of other roles in different organisations.

For a period of 6 months in 1997 he served as the director of the National Library of Ireland after the retirement of his predecessor, Patricia Donlon, on health grounds.

[9][10] He also made a contribution to the National Library in the form of a donation of his own personal diaries which documented his career in the civil service.

[5][18][19][20] He was once arrested in Romania in 1981, alongside his friend Tom Kilbane, for "pointing a telescope at a guarded power plant" in pursuit of sighting rare birds.

[17] He notably co-authored an article with James P. O'Connor about monarch butterfly sightings in Ireland for the Bulletin of the Irish Biogeographical Society.

[21] Cromien was also a member and president of the Half Moon Swimming and Water Polo Club, and often swam with them at Dublin's Great South Wall.

[1] His funeral was held at St Brigid's Church in Killester, and was attended by many civil servants, including the former taoiseach Bertie Ahern.

[21] Cromien is generally remembered as a polite and likeable intellectual who worked his way up from a modest beginning to become a well-respected civil servant.