Redmond, John (d. 1798), catholic priest, was born at Ballinakill, Marshalstown parish, Co. Wexford; no details are known of his parents. It seems that he attended a seminary in France in the late 1780s and once met the young Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1797–8 he was one of two curates serving in Ballyoughter parish, north-west Wexford, under the Rev. Frank Kavanagh (1723–1805). The parish clergy were on cordial terms with Lord Mountnorris of Camolin Park House, Ballyoughter, the pro-catholic county magnate. In November 1797 (as in other parishes in the sphere of influence of Mountnorris), they exerted pressure on their congregation to make public declarations of loyalty at Sunday mass. This was undertaken principally at the behest of Mountnorris, who felt his position in county politics undermined by current insinuations of catholic disloyalty. In the spring of 1798 Redmond was known to have refused absolution at Easter confession to members of the United Irishmen and was nicknamed an ‘Orange’ priest by recalcitrant parishioners. James Caulfield (qv), the conservative bishop of Ferns, admired his ‘regular, zealous, attentive’ demeanour (Whelan, ‘Role of the catholic priest’, 179). The parish clergy were required again in April 1798 to have their congregations assemble, profess loyalty, and renounce secret societies.
In June 1798, when rebels raided Camolin Park House, Redmond hurried to stop plunder but was bundled off the scene. He passed the rest of the rebellion in hiding, often in moderate protestant households. Though there is some ambiguity arising from Caulfield's comment in correspondence (made months after Redmond's death, when doubts as to the unfortunate priest's loyalty should have been settled) that ‘whether he joined them through terror, as was the case with some, or volunteer'd, I know not’ (ibid., 315), it has usually been held that he played no part in the rebellion. Accordingly he had no cause for fear when called to account for himself before Mountnorris in Gorey on 21 June 1798. In the main street, however, he ‘was treated as if manifestly guilty before trial, knocked down in the streets and rudely dragged by some yeomen’ (Whelan, ‘Wexford priests’, 179). Possibly under orders from Mountnorris, he was hauled to Gorey hill and hanged. Mountnorris turned up and fired several shots into the corpse. It was the universal assumption after the events of that month that he was an innocent victim of post-rebellion loyalist reprisal, having lost the protection of an angry and humiliated Mountnorris.