Francis Sheehy-Skeffington - Arrest and Murder

Arrest and Murder

During the week of the Easter Rising, Sheehy-Skeffington, who had been living at 11 (now 21), Grosvenor Place, Rathmines, Dublin, was concerned about the collapse of law and order. On the evening of Tuesday, 25 April, he went into the city centre to attempt to organise a citizens militia (police) to prevent the looting of damaged shops.

He was arrested for no stated, or indeed obvious, reason while returning home, by members of the 11th East Surrey Regiment at Portobello Bridge along with some hecklers who were following him, and, after admitting to having sympathy for the insurgents' cause (but not their tactics), he was held as an enemy sympathizer. Later that evening an officer of the 3rd battalion Royal Irish Rifles, Captain J. C. Bowen-Colthurst (a member of a County Cork family of the landed gentry), sent Sheehy-Skeffington out with an army raiding party in Rathmines, held as a hostage with his hands tied behind his back. The raiding party had orders that he was to be shot if it was attacked.

Bowen-Colthurst sought out "Fenians". He went to the home and shop of Alderman James Kelly at the corner of Camden Street and Harcourt Road, from which the name "Kelly's Corner" derives. Mistaking the Alderman (who was a Conservative) for a rebel, the soldiers destroyed the shop with hand grenades. Bowen-Colthurst took captive a young boy, two pro-British journalists who were in the shop — Thomas Dickson and Patrick MacIntyre — and a Sinn Féin politician, Richard O'Carroll, all of whom he had shot. Skeffington witnessed the two murders on the way to Rathmines. The two journalists were killed with him the following morning. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington was not told about her husband's detention or his death and only discovered what had happened four days later, when she met the chaplain of the barracks. Bowen-Colthurst attempted a cover-up and ordered the search and ransack of Skeffington's home, looking for evidence to damage him. This event resulted in a Westminster-ordered cover-up, as a result of which Bowen-Colthurst was detained in an asylum for eighteen months. He would later retire to Canada on a full pension.