Casey, William (1844–1907), Catholic priest and Land Leaguer, was born at Kilbeheny, Castlequarter, near Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, in 1844 and was educated briefly at Mount Melleray and then at St Colman's College, Fermoy, before going to Carlow College to train for the Catholic priesthood. He showed little scholarly ability but was a good speaker and fond of outdoor and country pursuits. He was ordained on 2 July 1868 and began his ecclesiastical career as a curate at Banogue in the diocese of Limerick. On 18 November 1871 he was moved to Abbeyfeale, Co. Limerick, where he had served briefly as a temporary curate and where he was to spend the remainder of his life, first as curate and from 1883 as administrator or parish priest.
Casey is not to be found in any of the published sources for the history of the period, but he was the subject of three short biographies (1908, 1920 and 1957) which portray him as a figure of first importance and immense popularity at Abbeyfeale, Co. Limerick. According to the most definitive of these (Harnett), he was effectively in charge of the parish by the mid 1870s and, an overbearing man with great energy, threw himself into the incipient agrarian agitation. On 29 September 1879, a few days before the October gale (rent payment) became due on the O'Grady estate, he spoke at a meeting held in the Square of Abbeyfeale and soon emerged as the local leader of the Land League. Agricultural tenants refused to pay in full and were evicted. Casey rented a large house and built huts on non-evicted farms to quarter evictees. It was on the O'Grady estate that fresh agitation, the Plan of Campaign, began in 1886. On St Patrick's day 1888 Casey came to the attention of the police by declaring that were a landlord ‘an angel from heaven he is a bad man provided he is a landlord’ (quoted in Geary, 29). Not until December 1901 were all the O'Grady tenants reinstated. A letter from Michael Davitt (qv) congratulated Casey on the settlement.
William Casey also built a men's temperance hall (he was a teetotaller) and two schools, promoted the Irish language (which he spoke from childhood), started a local band and presided over Limerick county Gaelic Athletic Association (the local GAA club in Abbeyfeale was later named after him). At the first local elections held after the Irish local government act of 1898, Casey intervened to prevent contests – supposedly to avoid expense and acrimony. After 1900 he was chairman of local branches of the United Irish League, was generally active in home-rule politics in west Limerick and north Kerry and attended national conventions in Dublin. Later he was chairman of the new county agricultural and technical committee. William Casey died, aged 63, on 29 December 1907. A crowd of about 12,000 people attended his funeral.
A statue of Casey was erected in the Square, Abbeyfeale, unveiled by a Holy Ghost priest, John Baptist Tuohill Murphy (1854–1926), later bishop of Mauritius. ‘More than him [Casey] perhaps’, wrote the biographer of another priest, Edward Leen (born in Casey's parish in 1885), ‘it commemorates something corporate in the town of Abbeyfeale – the primacy of the catholic priesthood’ (O'Carroll, Leen, 2). According to the same writer, at a count taken at the Eucharistic congress held in Ireland in 1932, for which many Irish-born priests returned from abroad, it was found that no fewer than 80 of them were born in the parish of Abbeyfeale. The two later biographies of Casey are hagiographical and more informative on the authors’ minds and times than on their subject. Nothing has been ascertained about his family other than that three nephews were also priests. Presumably he was a close relation of John Casey (qv) (1820–91).