Life
d. 1970; son of Francis and Hanna; Professor of French at TCD and Irish
Senator, celebrated as a spokesman for liberal causes; publicly professed himself a humanist and an an agnostic; campaigned against corporal punishment in Irish schools; his funeral address was delivered by Sean O’Faolain (‘You
won, Owen, you won!’); a tribute appears in Hubert Butler, Escape
from the Anthill (1985); he is spoken of by Conor Cruise
O’Brien, his cousin, as his chief influence.
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Works
‘My Time at Trinity College’, The Recorder: Journal of the
Irish American Historical Society, 13, 1 (Spring 2000), pp.7-37.
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Notes
Peter Tyrrell's autobiography (published as Founded on Fear: Lettertrack Industrial School, War and Exile, IAP 2006) was written in 1959 with the encouragement of Senator Owen Sheehy Skeffington whom Tyrrell had contacted having heard of his campaign against Irish schools' “pathological reliance on punishment”. As recounted in Books Ireland (“First Flush”, Dec. 2006), ‘a postcard addressed to Skeffington was what finally helped to identify the charred remains of Tyrrell, who had set light to himself on Hampstead Heath in 1968.’ Tyrrell (b.1916) served in the British Army in Palestine and India in and was an inmate of a German prisoner-of-war camp.
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