Conolly, Thomas James (Tommy) (1902–92), lawyer, was born in Dublin on 4 January 1902, the second of six children, five daughters and one son, of Thomas Conolly, master builder, of Fernville, Glasnevin, and his wife, Teresa (née McQuaid), of Stormanstown, Co. Dublin. Educated at Clongowes Wood College, he went on to UCD, where he graduated MA and won an NUI travelling studentship in economics; he spent three years at the Sorbonne, before returning to study law at King's Inns. In 1927 he was called to the bar, where he was initially a pupil of George Gavan Duffy (qv). He joined the western circuit eventually taking silk (1946) and becoming a bencher of the King's Inns.
While he enjoyed triumphs in many arenas it was in the supreme court that he displayed his most characteristic skills. His contemporaries spoke enviously of the guile with which he won over individual judges on the court, somehow managing to convince them in the process that they had thought of points which he had deftly planted in their minds. One of the most spectacular examples was the libel action brought by Patrick Kavanagh (qv) against The Leader magazine, which had been thrown out by a jury in the high court but which Conolly succeeded in rescuing against all the odds in the supreme court. His status was such that Cecil Lavery (qv), sometime leader of the Irish bar and later a supreme court judge, said of Conolly that he had the finest of legal minds. Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh (qv), when chief justice, unprecedentedly adjourned the supreme court until Conolly had recovered from an indisposition, observing that ‘the case before us is so important that we felt that such a constitutional matter should not be decided in the absence of his submissions’.
It is no exaggeration to describe Tommy Conolly as the ‘onlie begetter’ of modern Irish constitutional law. To barristers imbued with the tradition of the sovereignty of parliament the advent of Conolly's treatment of the constitution as a forensic influence which infuses every aspect of litigation and statutory interpretation was dramatic to the extent that the seminal work on the Irish constitution by John Maurice Kelly (qv) may be regarded as Conolly's monument. But perhaps of all his cases – and the law reports from the 1950s to the 1970s are strewn with the corpses of the acts which he persuaded the courts were unconstitutional – that of which he was proudest was the Jock Haughey episode in 1971, when the supreme court found invalid the constitutionality of the act under which the dáil's public accounts committee was given privilege. In the turbulent wake of the arms trial, an oireachtas committee had been set up to investigate the possible diversion of public monies to arming the provisional IRA. It was invested with draconian powers which a strong divisional court of the high court had no difficulty in upholding. Undeterred Conolly soldiered on to the supreme court and another victory, eliciting from Chief Justice Ó Dálaigh (qv) the classic formulation of the requirements of due process in modern Irish law.
Conolly's attainments were not solely in the field of the constitution, but embraced every facet of the law in the practice of which he excelled. They were informed with a scholarship both classical and modern. His death deprived Irish jurisprudence and the Irish bar of an influence not easily to be replaced.
In 1939 Conolly married Mairin Buckley, and after her decease, he married Angela Mackey in 1949. There were no children of either marriage. His sister Anne was married to Patrick McGilligan (qv), government minister, and his sister Lillian to William Fay (qv), diplomat; his elder sister Violet Conolly (qv) was an authority on Soviet Russia. Thomas Conolly died 21 September 1992.