Career and Politics
When he graduated he worked as a free-lance journalist. His wife, a teacher, was the primary breadwinner. They joined the Irish Women's Suffrage and Local Government Association and the Young Ireland Branch of the United Irish League (the constituency element of the Irish Parliamentary Party). They also supported the Women's Social and Political Union which lobbied for women's rights in Britain.
In 1908 his book Michael Davitt; Revolutionary, Agitator, and Labor Leader was published. In 1912 Skeffington co-founded and was a joint editor of The Irish Citizen newspaper, issued by the Irish Women's Franchise League, and he made contributions to various publications in Ireland, England, France and North America.
During the 1913 Dublin Lock-out he became involved in a peace committee intended to reconcile both factions. He became a vice-chairman of the Irish Citizens Army when it was established in 1913 on the basis that it would have a strictly defensive role and he resigned when it became a military entity.
Sheehy-Skeffington testified to a tribunal as a witness to the arrest of the leading trade unionist Jim Larkin on O'Connell street and the subsequent police riot against a peaceful crowd that had occurred on the last weekend of August in 1914. His testimony stated that he was in the street with a group of women caring for a person that had already been assaulted by the police when a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police charged towards this group with his baton raised. He reports that it was only because he called out the policeman's number that the man was dissuaded from the violence he had so clearly intended. He said that he was later abused by a gang of policemen showing clear signs of intoxication in the yard of the police station at College Green where he went to make his complaint and that their officers had no control over their behaviour.
He campaigned against recruitment on the outbreak of World War I and was jailed for six months.
Read more about this topic: Francis Sheehy-Skeffington
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