Career and Adult Life
He later became a lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was elected in 1954 as a member of the 8th Seanad Éireann by the Dublin University constituency. He was re-elected in 1957, but lost his seat in 1961. He was returned to the 11th Seanad at the 1965 election, and was re-elected for a final time in 1969.
In the Seanad, he was known as a champion of human rights and an opponent of authoritarianism, campaigning for an end to corporal punishment in Irish schools.
In 1935, he married Andrée Denis, a French graduate of the Sorbonne, with whom he had two sons and one daughter. She later wrote a biography of her husband: "Skeff: A Life of Owen Sheehy Skeffington 1909-1970". They resided at Hazelbrook Cottage, Rathfarnham, Dublin.
In the late 1950s memorialist Peter Tyrrell began a long term correspondence with him. Sheehy-Skeffington encouraged Tyrrell to write his autobiography, which posthumously helped to expose the brutal conditions in Irish Industrial schools, and Letterfrack in particular. When Tyrrell committed suicide in 1967, the only clue to his identity was a card addressed to Owen Sheehy-Skeffington.
Read more about this topic: Owen Sheehy-Skeffington
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