Byrne, Edward (1739/40–1804), merchant and chairman of the Catholic Committee, was a son of John Byrne of Saggart, Co. Dublin, whose father, Garret Byrne (d. 1752), was a farmer there and, according to a descendant, ‘lived in the castle of Saggart and owned the estate belonging thereto’ (Shearman papers). Another source states that the Byrnes were landowners until the 1650s. John Byrne inherited from his father and seems to have passed on the farm (which was more likely to have been held on a lease than owned outright) to his son Mark, whose descendants were still living at Saggart a century later.
Having been apprenticed to a Dublin merchant named Toole, Edward Byrne made a fortune as a distiller and sugar-baker, and had interests in trade with France and in textile manufacturing, eventually acquiring the reputation of being the wealthiest catholic merchant in Ireland. Early in his career he was in partnership with a kinsman, John Byrne (who died in 1780 leaving over £10,000), the firm being known as John Byrne & Co. Later he was in partnership with another wealthy catholic merchant, Randal MacDonnell (qv). Not long before his death he purchased for £40,000 an estate in Co. Down and contemplated purchasing another (March–April 1801). A member of the Irish house of commons stated in 1792 that Byrne paid ‘£100,000 a year duty to his majesty's revenue’, and the Dublin Evening Post stated at the time of his death that ‘he has paid into the Revenue larger sums than any individual in this country’ and his ‘property is almost incalculable and there are few London merchants who possess more’. In his will he provided for stated legacies amounting to £91,523; it was proved for £69,000. But when, in July 1793 (fifteen months after the passing of the act allowing catholics to be admitted to full membership of trade guilds), Byrne applied to join the merchants’ guild he was blackballed.
In the 1790s Byrne rose to prominence on the Catholic Committee. It was at his house that its select committee met in December 1791 and effected a coup, after the leading catholic nobleman, Lord Kenmare (qv), with sixty-seven followers, defied the Catholic Committee by presenting to the viceroy a petition for relief which Byrne and the majority considered ‘insidious and servile’. John Keogh (qv) was authorised to go to London to meet the king's ministers. Kenmare left the committee and Byrne became chairman. Byrne played a major role in the organisation of the representative Catholic Convention (December 1792) and was one of the four delegates who presented a new, less timid petition to the king in January 1793. Though his name is attached to various documents emanating from the committee and is frequently mentioned by Theobald Wolfe Tone (qv), who was assistant secretary, no letters or speeches have been found and so his political opinions cannot be precisely ascertained.
Byrne presided at the 4,000-strong meeting held at Francis Street Chapel on 27 February 1795 to protest at the dismissal of the whig viceroy, Lord Fitzwilliam (qv), and was one of the delegates who subsequently took an agreed petition to London. But he seems then to have fallen out with Keogh and to have taken little or no part in politics thereafter. When trouble broke out in 1798 he applied for, but was refused, a passport to leave Ireland. Like other wealthy merchants, he and MacDonnell made a ‘voluntary contribution’ to the treasury ‘for the defence of the kingdom’. At £1,000 it was one of the largest. Byrne personified the middle-class tendency of the Catholic Committee in the crucial years 1791–5 and the unwillingness of the majority to countenance armed rebellion.
From 1770 the Byrnes’ business premises were at Mullinahack, off Wormwood Gate, on the south bank of the Liffey, at the house formerly occupied by Lord Allen; Edward Byrne also had a house in North Great George's Street. He was the subject of a poem, ‘Ned Byrne of Mullinahack’ by Edward Lysaght (qv), published in 1810, in which a mockery is made of his trepidation in 1798. Edward Byrne died in Dublin on 21 December 1804, aged sixty-four, and was buried at Saggart. In the graveyard of the catholic chapel there is an imposing sepulchral monument with a long inscription, part of which declares that he was ‘endowed by nature with a sound and penetrating judgment and great strength of mind’. William Drennan (qv) believed him to be ‘a man of great shrewdness and indefatigable assiduity in his occupation’. Thomas Reynolds (qv) remembered him as ‘purse-proud and ignorant to a notorious degree as to everything out of the routine of his trade’.
Byrne married twice. With his first wife, Mary Devine, he had at least two daughters and at least six sons. The eldest son, John Byrne, represented Co. Tyrone at the Catholic Convention (1792), joined the Dublin Society of United Irishmen (April 1793), and married Elizabeth, the daughter and heir of Henry Byrne (d. 1796), a wealthy catholic merchant of Allardstown or Mount Byrne, Co. Louth. John Byrne was in France in 1802; it was reported when his father died that he was employed mostly ‘abroad’ and was to inherit the bulk of the property, and he was back in Dublin by 1805, when he played a role in the presentation of a new catholic petition. His supposed authorship of the pamphlet An impartial account of the late disturbances in the county of Armagh (1792) has been largely refuted by L. M. Cullen and David W. Miller. His marriage resulted in a son, Edward Henry Byrne (b. 1800?), who studied at Cambridge, married a French nobleman's daughter, and had a house near Toulouse as well as properties in Ireland. Another of Edward Byrne's sons (probably the third), also Edward, represented Queen's County in the Catholic Convention and later ruined himself by commercial speculations in Liverpool. Edward Byrne's fourth son was Patrick Byrne, born 16 March 1774 and admitted as a barrister in 1797; he disappears from Wilson's Dublin Directory in the late 1820s. Of Byrne's sons Thomas, Gerard, and Mark nothing is known. Edward Byrne mentions in his will (extracted by John Francis Shearman) a daughter, Celia McCarthy, wife of John McCarthy of Bordeaux. Another daughter, a Mrs Lynch, died in 1793.
Edward Byrne's second wife, Maryanne (b. 1760s), whom he married in July 1797, was a daughter of Philip Roe, esq. (d. 1767), and Catherine Maryanne (née Mathew); she stood to gain £3,000 from the will of her maternal grandfather, Thomas Mathew of Thomastown Castle, Co. Tipperary, but her mother's remarriage to John Scott, the future Lord Clonmell (qv), and death (c.1770) while Thomas Mathew was still living vitiated her prospects. Lengthy litigation involving Scott ensued; it was argued in 1797 that Maryanne Byrne, as ‘a Protestant perverted to the Popish religion’, no longer had any rightful claim. Whether she bore any children is not known, but according to Fitzpatrick the numerous Byrne family had died out in Dublin by the 1860s.