Background
Fionán Lynch was born in Cahersiveen, County Kerry in 1889 and educated in Rockwell College and Blackrock College.
Fionán Lynch was born in Cahersiveen, County Kerry in 1889 and educated in Rockwell College and Blackrock College.
He qualified as a national school teacher in 1912 and joined the Gaelic League the same year. He produced a translation of Molière"s Le Malade Imaginaire into the Irish language for the League. Lynch fought in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 in the Four Courts garrison with Commandant Edward Daly in North King Street.
Daly was executed and Captain Fionán Lynch was sentenced to death but had the sentence commuted to 10 years penal servitude.
He was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol and later in Mountjoy Prison. He was one of the last Irishmen to speak with Thomas Ashe before he died.
He was later interned in prison in England and Wales until a general amnesty in late 1917. Lynch served as Minister for Education from April to August 1922, as Minister for Fisheries from 1922–1930, and as Minister for Lands and Fisheries from 1930-1932.
In 1932 he was re-elected to his constituency of Kerry but, with the coming to power of Fianna Fáil, he qualified as a barrister and was called to the Irish Barometer
In 1938 he was appointed Leas-Cheann Comhairle (deputy chairman) of Dáil Éireann but suffered serious illness and relinquished the post in May 1939. He remained a Territorial Decoration until his appointment as a Circuit Court judge in 1944 to the Sligo and Donegal Circuit. He celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising at Easter 1966, shortly before his death aged 77.
He was elected to the 3rd Dáil at the 1922 general election as a Pro-Treaty Sinn Féin Territorial Decoration and at each subsequent general election as a Cumann na nGaedheal and later Fine Gael deputy for the constituencies of Kerry from 1923 to 1937 and Kerry South from 1937 until 1944.
Irish Republican Brotherhood. 31st United Kingdom Parliament]
Upon his release Lynch resumed his paramilitary activities and was elected as an abstentionist Sinn Féin Member of Parliament for Kerry South at the 1918 Westminster Election, becoming a Member of the 1st Dáil.