Early Life and Studies
Born in Golden, County Tipperary he was educated at Rockwell College and at 17 entered the Holy Ghost Congregation to train to become one of the Holy Ghost Fathers. He was sent by the order to Orly in 1900 as a novice, not long after the government of René Waldeck-Rousseau had begun an anti-clerical drive in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair. Although illness prevented him from completing his time in France, the episode was to influence his later ideas on relations between Church and State. As a youth Fahey had excelled at rugby union and he had played on the same team as Éamon de Valera for a time, cementing a lifelong association between the two.
After working at St. Mary's College, Dublin, Fahey returned to studies at the Royal University of Ireland in 1904, achieving a first class honours degree, later studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome before finally being ordained a priest in 1910. Returning to Ireland, he was appointed Senior Scholasticate of the Irish Province of the Holy Ghost Fathers at Kimmage in 1912.
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