Scully, Vincent (1810–71), barrister, landowner, banker, and politician, was the second son in the family of five sons and three daughters of Denys Scully (qv) and his second wife, Katherine (d. 1843), daughter of Vincent Eyre of Highfield and Newholt, Derbyshire, England. His paternal grandfather was James Scully (qv). Vincent Scully was born on 8 September 1810 in Co. Tipperary, presumably at his father's house at Kilfeacle. (One source states that he was born on 8 January 1810 in Dublin.) He was educated at Oscott, a catholic school in Staffordshire, then entered both Trinity College, Cambridge (on 16 July 1828), and Trinity College, Dublin (on 20 October 1828), but did not graduate.
He was called to the Irish bar in 1833, practising successfully and becoming a queen's counsel (1849). In legal circles he was known for the Irish chancery reports, written with Sir Matthew Sausse (1805?–1867). Sausse was chief justice of Bombay from 1859 to 1866, the first Irish catholic to hold judicial office in British India. As Vincent Scully's elder brother, James, had died unmarried (he was murdered on 26 November 1842), Vincent succeeded to Kilfeacle. He had residences at Mantle Hill, Golden, Co. Tipperary, and Merrion Square, Dublin. He purchased the Castle Hyde estate for £14,425 in December 1851, and sold it again in court for nearly £45,000 in 1860. A director of the Tipperary Bank (from 1848 to 1854), like his first cousin John Sadleir (qv), son of Denys Scully's sister Joanna, he seems to have suffered little from its collapse on 13 February 1856.
As a young man he wrote much verse, particularly in the Oscotian, of which he was an editor, and contributed to the Dublin and London Magazine (1826?). Later a supporter of agrarian reform, he was the author of three pamphlets: Poor rate (Ireland): present system of collection, its evils and the remedy (1850), The Irish land question with practical plans for an improved land tenure (1851) and Free trade in land explained (1854).
He spoke on 23 August 1851 at a public meeting in Dublin held to oppose the whig government's Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, the purpose of which was to prohibit the use of British and Irish place names by catholic bishops in their titles. The secretary of the meeting was Sadleir. When a parliamentary by-election occurred in Co. Cork, Scully, supported by Sadleir's friend William Keogh (qv), was adopted by local liberals as their candidate. He was elected MP by 3,956 votes to the 3,105 of the tories’ candidate, Moreton Frewen, on 22 March 1852. At the general election four months later Scully was returned without a contest. Though he thought of himself as an independent, he declined to join the independent Irish group in the house of commons and usually supported the government of the day. Scully tried unsuccessfully to get the government to substitute competitive for qualifying examinations for entry to the civil service (1855), a reform that would no doubt have benefited Irish catholics. Defeated by two liberal challengers at the next general election in April 1857, he managed to return to parliament without a contest in May 1859, but was on the next occasion, in July 1865, ousted by a wide margin. In the chamber he had a ‘habit of speaking, and at considerable length, upon all sorts of miscellaneous subjects’ (Times, 6 June 1871). Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (qv) thought Scully's ‘manners were eccentric and his pronunciation ridiculous’ (Duffy, 211).
He died 4 June 1871 at his house in St John's Wood, London, and was buried in the Scully family tomb on the Rock of Cashel, which in 1869 had been surmounted by a large, imposing cross as a memorial to his father. He married 6 September 1841 Susanna (d. 3 September 1874), daughter of another barrister, John Grogan (1770–1832), of Harcourt Street, Dublin, and Moyvore, Co. Westmeath; she was the sister of Sir Edward Grogan (1802–91), tory MP for Dublin city (1841–65). They had one son and three daughters.
Their son, Vincent Scully (1846–1927), landowner and banker, was born in August 1846 and educated at Oscott and Christ Church, Oxford (from where he graduated BA in 1869). He was high sheriff of Co. Tipperary (1870) before succeeding his father to landed property there, recorded in the mid-1870s as 5,599 acres, with an annual valuation of £3,820. By the late 1880s he was a leading figure in the Munster and Leinster Bank. He was briefly but conspicuously in the public eye, soon after the split in the home rule party led by Charles Stewart Parnell (qv), as Parnell's candidate in the North Kildare by-election of December 1890, adopted mainly because he would pay his own expenses. After a hard-fought and widely reported campaign, he was defeated by Sir John Pope Hennessy (qv) by 2,527 votes to 1,362 on 22 December. The Parnellite defeat was the first of many, and widened the division in a party that only a month before had seemed capable of forcing Irish home rule on a future liberal government.
But Scully preferred the life of a country gentleman, soon giving up his bank directorship (in 1893) and otherwise avoiding politics. During the civil war his house was ransacked. Vincent Scully the younger died in Dublin on 2 November 1927. He married on 21 November 1871 Emma Eliza Mary Clare (d. 7 April 1890), daughter of Pierce Marcus Barron (1806–79), DL, of Belmont Park, Co. Waterford, and with her had three sons and three daughters. One of the sons, Vincent Marcus Barron Scully (1881–1941), had a distinguished military career, commanding the 5th Bn Connaught Rangers during the first world war, and was awarded the DSO (1918) and OBE (1918). Vincent Scully's second marriage, on 22 July 1897, to Amy, youngest daughter of John Netterville Barron of the 59th regiment, was childless.