Etchingham, Sean R. (1870–1923), politician and journalist, was born 6 February 1870 at Ballintray (near Gorey), Co. Wexford, son of Jack Etchingham, gardener, and his wife, Margaret (née Redmond), who also had at least three daughters. The family had a Fenian tradition, which considerably influenced Etchingham's political development. At an early age he became a stable-boy and apprentice jockey in the stables owned by John Whelan of the Plough Hotel, Carlow; he achieved considerable success as a jockey on local racetracks in south-eastern Ireland (notably Taghmon, Ballybar, and Tullow). In later life he himself owned racehorses.
Etchingham, who had taught himself to read and write, began his journalistic career by writing reports on horse-races; later he moved into wider sports journalism (his reports on GAA matches were remembered as conspicuously well written and were held to have done much to promote the GAA in Wexford) and commentary on public affairs. He was particularly associated with the Enniscorthy Echo, participating in its founding in 1901 with William Sears (qv) and Sir Thomas Esmonde (qv). The Echo, unlike most provincial newspapers, became associated with the nascent Sinn Féin movement soon after its foundation by Arthur Griffith (qv). Etchingham allegedly possessed a remarkable memory, which enabled him to produce extensive reports of meetings without taking a shorthand record. His most popular contribution to the paper was a dialect column supposedly written by ‘Patsy Patrick’ and commenting on current affairs in the style of the well-known ‘Mr Dooley’ column produced by the Irish-American journalist Finlay Peter Dunne (1867–1937); its sardonic comments on the doings of local bodies and on the political manoeuvres of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) were widely relished.
Etchingham did not confine his political interventions to journalism; in February 1908 he took a leading role in the North Leitrim by-election on behalf of the Sinn Féin candidate C. J. Dolan (qv) and was nearly killed when pro-Redmondite members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians broke up a Sinn Féin meeting at Manorhamilton. In the years before the Great War Etchingham was an active member of Gorey Poor Law Guardians (early in 1914, when they rescinded an anti-partition resolution on orders from IPP headquarters, which saw it as a covert vote of no confidence, he protested that both they and the nation as a whole lacked backbone) and of the rural district council. The construction of what was locally known as ‘Gorey Garden City’ (the erection of labourers’ cottages and smallholdings on 40 acres of land on the outskirts of the town) was attributed to his strong and sustained campaign on its behalf.
Etchingham held strongly pro-labour views; in 1911 he supported Wexford foundry workers who were locked out when their employers refused to recognise James Larkin's (qv) ITGWU, despite Griffith's hostility to Larkinism. (The Wexford dispute was in many respects a test-run for the better-known Dublin labour conflict of 1913–14.) Etchingham, who expressed personal admiration for Larkin, subsequently founded his own Trade and Labour League, which formed numerous branches in Wexford, Wicklow, and Kildare; it appealed mainly to agricultural labourers, and on his death a member of the Monageer branch claimed: ‘it was he who first got an increase in wages for the farm workers of Wicklow and Wexford’ (Enniscorthy Echo, 5 May 1923). In 1915 Etchingham resigned from the Echo to concentrate his attention on the league and on his activities with the Irish Volunteers.
Etchingham was a founder and the first secretary of the Gorey branch of the Gaelic League, and served on both the county and national boards of the GAA. (In the last years of his life he was GAA county president, a position he held at the time of his death.) He composed many ballads under the nom de plume Sean MacAlla; some dealing with the beauties of his native Courtown area, such as ‘The bridge of Ballinatray’, achieved local popularity. He was a well-known humorist and singer at local concerts and gatherings (notably those sponsored by the Gaelic League), possessing a clear and resonant voice; GAA colleagues recalled his conversation keeping the carriage in a roar on the way to Croke Park. Despite this affability, his humour had a perverse streak; he possessed a withdrawn and reserved personality and had few close friends, though some longstanding acquaintances claimed to have detected ‘beneath the crust of mordant humour a mine of pure gold’ (Enniscorthy Echo, 28 Apr. 1923, 4; the anonymous writer may be William Sears). He never married.
As an officer in the 3rd battalion of the North Wexford brigade of the Irish Volunteers, Etchingham participated in the occupation of Enniscorthy during Easter week 1916 and was placed in charge of issuing travel permits; at the end of the week the Easter rebels initially refused to believe that the Dublin leaders had surrendered, and Etchingham, with another officer, Seamus Doyle, was sent under a flag of truce to meet P. H. Pearse (qv) in Arbour Hill prison to confirm the situation. After the surrender Etchingham was sentenced to death by a court martial (despite characteristically inquiring whether he could be let off under the first offenders act). His sentence was commuted to five years, but as a leader he was sent to Lewes prison and thence to Dartmoor rather than to Frongoch.
Although Etchingham took advantage of his imprisonment to perfect his knowledge of Irish, becoming a fluent speaker, and composed several poems (lacking paper, he wrote them on a slate and memorised them before erasure), his health was permanently affected by prison conditions. He contracted tuberculosis and was released in June 1917 after Éamon de Valera (qv) appealed on his behalf to the prison authorities; for the rest of his life his health remained extremely feeble. In May 1918 he was rearrested in connection with the so-called German plot; while still in prison he was elected TD for East Wicklow in the general election of that year.
On 28 November 1919 Etchingham was appointed by the dáil cabinet to the (non-cabinet) post of minister for fisheries, though he was not formally confirmed by the dáil until 29 June 1920; that same month he also became the first Sinn Féin chairman of Wexford county council. Although he enjoyed a reputation for administrative competence in his local government activities, his ministerial experience was unhappy; efforts to promote cooperative fishing societies with the assistance of loans from the National Land Bank produced a series of highly publicised fiascos, with members of the societies mismanaging or embezzling their funds and failing to match the dáil's contributions with their subscriptions. Of five schemes financed by dáil funds, only one was regarded as successful by August 1922. The lack of adequate supervision which contributed to this disaster may have sprung from the belief (which Etchingham shared with many Sinn Féiners) that the controls exercised by the Dublin Castle administration over development schemes which it funded had in fact been intended to sabotage them. The schemes’ failure was also linked to declining fish prices and to violence by crown forces. After the loan scheme ended in March 1921, the Department of Fisheries confined itself to issuing advice to fishermen on marketing; when Etchingham stepped down as minister on 26 August 1921, the department had little more than a nominal existence.
As the war of independence intensified, Etchingham spent much of his time on the run in Co. Wexford (at one point evading a search by engaging in a long conversation about boxing with a soldier, who decided such a knowledgeable aficionado of the sport could not possibly be a dangerous enemy). In May 1921 his residence at Courtown Harbour, near Enniscorthy, was destroyed by Black and Tans. In the same month Etchingham was returned as one of four Sinn Féin TDs for Wexford in the uncontested general election.
Etchingham belonged to the hard-line republican wing of Sinn Féin; Mary MacSwiney (qv) later recorded that it was some cryptically expressed misgivings uttered by him during the early stages of the truce which first alerted her to the possibility that the dáil leadership might settle for something less than a fully sovereign republic. During the debates on the ratification of the treaty he was described by the Irish Independent sketchwriters as speaking in ‘a blend of the humorous and the melodramatic, delivered in a tone curiously reminiscent of a veteran preacher’ (de Burca and Boyle, 16). He denounced the treaty as ‘a treaty of terror’ signed under duress, declared that those who accepted it under duress now would hardly stand up to the empire ‘after one year, two years, or ten years when you have Colonial or Free State fat in your bodies’, reminded those who spoke of taking the oath with reservations that two years previously the GAA leadership – himself included – had expelled civil servants who took an oath of loyalty to retain their employment after 1916, and declared that the treaty would reduce Ireland to ‘a bow window in the western gable of the British Empire’. In the debate on the election of Arthur Griffith to the dáil presidency Etchingham spoke of his regret in opposing Griffith ‘for old times’ sake', because he is the man ‘that ploughed the soil’, even as he and Griffith accused each other of telling deliberate lies. As the anti-treaty deputies walked out at the conclusion of the debate, Etchingham was the last to leave, engaging in an altercation with Michael Collins (qv) on the floor of the chamber as he departed.
Etchingham contested the 1922 general election as an anti-treaty Sinn Féin candidate in Wexford but was defeated. Thereafter his failing health and the civil war excluded him from political activity. In his last message to Wexford county council he declared himself heartbroken ‘at the continuance of the present differences among Irishmen who had done so much in the past for the uplifting of our motherland’ (Enniscorthy Echo, 5 May 1923). After several months in a Dublin nursing home he returned to Courtown Harbour, where he died 23 April 1923. The extensive expressions of condolence in Wexford newspapers and local bodies reflected his local reputation, with Labour representatives such as Richard Corish (qv) declaring: ‘any time the workers made an effort to do anything for their advancement Sean Etchingham was always behind them’, and the pro-treaty councillor J. J. O'Byrne (who stood against Etchingham in 1922) declaring: ‘He was a man, and although one might differ with him, still one would love him just the same’ (ibid., 12 May 1923, 6).