Sheil, RICHARD LALOR, Irish patriot and orator, was born at Drumdowney, County Tipperary, 17th August 1791, son of a prosperous Cadiz merchant, who had returned to Ireland about the time that the most odious of the Catholic disabilities began to be relaxed. He passed his earliest years at his father's estate of Bellevue near Waterford, and in due time went to school, first to Kensington, then to Stonyhurst, whence he passed in 1807 to Trinity College, Dublin. Soon after this his father failed, but young Sheil was enabled through the help of friends to graduate B.A. in July 1811, and to enter Lincoln's Inn in November of the same year. He was called to the Irish bar in Hilary term, 1814. The next few years he devoted to literature, producing a series of plays, most of which proved successful in Dublin or London: Adelaide, or The
Emigrants (1814); The Apostate (1817); Bellamira (1818); Evadne, partly based on Shirley's Traitor (1819); The Huguenot (1819); Montoni (1820); and an adaptation of Massinger's play, The Forgotten Dowry (1824). His Sketches of the Irish Bar, written in conjunction with the younger Curran, appeared during 1822 in the pages of the New Monthly Magazine (2 vols. 1855). In 1823 Sheil joined O'Connell's Catholic Association, which was dissolved in 1825, and throughout gave the great tribute a loyal but an independent support. After the Lords threw out the Catholic Relief Bill (May 1825) he aided his chief in forming the New Catholic Association, and throughout the course of the agitation he devoted enormous labour to the preparation of those ornate and impassioned speeches, which, despite his shrill voice and feeble gestures, had often a magical effect on his audience, and many of which remain to posterity among the masterpieces of English oratory. After Catholic emancipation was gained in 1829 Sheil devoted much more of his time than before to his profession. He was returned to parliament for Milborne Port, Somerset, a pocket-borough of Lord Anglesea's, and at the dissolution of 1831 for Louth, and later he sat for Tipperary and Dungarvan. A charge brought against his honour in 1834 by Lord Althorp, that he had in private supported the Coercion Bill of 1833 while publicly opposing it, was unanimously rebutted by a Committee of Privileges. After the defeat of Repeal in 1834, which years later he described as 'a splendid phantom,' Sheil mostly supported the Whigs, and in 1838 received a commission in the Greenwich Hospital. In August 1839 under Melbourne he became vice-president of the Board of Trade, and a privy-councillor—the first Catholic to gain that honour. Under Lord John Russell in 1846 he was appointed Master of the Mint, and in 1850 British minister at Florence. Here his constitution, enfeebled by gout, sank under the shock of the sudden death of his stepson, May 25, 1851.
See his Memoirs, by W. Torrens McCullagh (2 vols. 1855). His Speeches, with a memoir by T. MacNevin, were published in 1845; the Speeches, Legal and Political, edited by M. W. Savage, in 1855 (2 vols.).