Sweetman, John (1751/2–1826), brewer, United Irishman, and art connoisseur, was born probably in Dublin, the younger of two sons of John Sweetman (d. 1784), a brewer of King Street South, and his wife Mary (née Sweetman), daughter and heir of Patrick Sweetman (1702–71). John and his elder brother Patrick Sweetman (1750–93) prospered in the porter brewing trade, with premises at 83 St Stephen's Green and in Francis Street. In 1783 Patrick joined other Dublin merchants in forming a chamber of commerce. Both brothers were involved in politics. Patrick joined the Catholic Committee in January 1781 and was a delegate of the parish of St Nicholas Without at the Catholic Convention of December 1792. He died in his early forties, at Drumcondra, on 4 November 1793. He married in 1771 Eleanor Thunder (d. 1813), daughter of Michael Thunder of Ballaly, Co. Dublin. The Thunders were prosperous catholic merchants to whom the Sweetmans were already related by marriage.
Patrick and Eleanor Sweetman were the progenitors, through their son Michael (1779–1852), who resided at Longtown, Co. Kildare, of two long lines of distinguished Sweetmans. Michael's eldest son, another Patrick (1803–85), was great-grandfather of Hugh Gerard Sweetman (qv) and Michael Joseph Sweetman (qv), and great-great-grandfather of Michael John Sweetman (qv); Michael's second son, John (1805–59), was father of John Sweetman (qv) (1844–1936) and grandfather of William Sweetman (qv), a unique example of an Irish catholic bourgeois (not gentry) family achieving prominence in public life for 250 years or so.
John Sweetman the United Irishman, like his brother, joined the Catholic Committee (on 9 February 1791) and was a delegate to the Catholic Convention (as a representative of St Andrew's parish). Unlike his brother he joined the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, being admitted on 16 November 1792. In both catholic and United Irish politics he was active until 1798. By October 1792 he was acting as secretary of the catholic sub-committee and in April 1793 he was, with Richard McCormick (qv), a secretary of the reassembled Catholic Convention. Early in 1793 he published a pamphlet rebutting charges made by a committee of the Irish house of lords that he had abetted Defenders. He was, however, still considered one of the more radical politicians.
During the crisis occasioned by the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam (qv) as lord lieutenant (in February–April 1795) he was active again on the Catholic Committee and chaired the well-attended catholic public meeting held in the Francis Street chapel on 9 April to consider the report of the delegates who had returned from London after presenting to the king an address asking for Fitzwilliam's restoration. He was a member of the Leinster directory of the radicalised, militarised United Irishmen and was frequently mentioned by Francis Higgins (qv), who reported to Dublin Castle several meetings at Sweetman's house of Catholic Committee men and United Irishmen, between August 1796 and January 1798. In the roundup of United Irish leaders in the spring of 1798 Sweetman was arrested in Francis Street on 12 March 1798. This event, his detention at Kilmainham prison under a warrant of the privy council and his removal in March 1799 with other United Irish ‘state prisoners’ to Fort George in Scotland are recorded in a brief diary he wrote and which Madden published (1843).
Of Sweetman's impression of Theobald Wolfe Tone (qv) there is an eloquent testimony in the pocket-book that Tone, under sentence of death in November 1798, intended for Sweetman and inscribed ‘Te nunc habet ista secundum’ (Virgil). Sweetman, however, took no further part in politics in Ireland. A few months after his arrest he was forced to sell his collection of paintings and sculpture (numbering seventy-two items) ‘purchased on the Continent and imported by him before the breaking out of war’. It contained works by artists of the French, Dutch and Italian schools, two of them by Rubens (‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ and ‘The original head)’, and one by Holbein (‘The assumption’). After being released from Fort George in 1802, banished from Ireland under 38 Geo. III, c. 78, he went to Lyons, then settled in Paris, where, at first a close associate of Thomas Addis Emmet (qv), he seems later to have lived quietly for many years. An application to return to Ireland in 1814 was refused by the chief secretary, Sir Robert Peel (qv).
The Sweetman brewery in Francis Street, Dublin, continued in his and his brother's name until 1801, after which the proprietors were listed in Wilson's Dublin Directory as John and Michael Sweetman. Apparently John was now the sleeping partner of his late brother's son Michael, whom he had apprenticed on 18 May 1796. In the directory for 1815 the firm was listed as Sweetman and Butler but two years later Michael was listed as in sole charge. It was John Sweetman who laid the foundation stone of the Carmelite chapel in Clarendon Street, Dublin, on 3 October 1793, having had some role in procuring the site. While he was in Paris he became interested in some way in the plan for a catholic cathedral in Dublin, and appears to have been paid £307 for expenses. He returned to Ireland about 1820 and may have been the John Sweetman who was on the cathedral building committee (1822–3). Sweetman married in 1784 Maryanne Atkinson, whose father, Edward Atkinson (d. 1795), was also a brewer; they had a son, John (1785–1855), and a daughter, Mary (d. unmarried, 1815?). John Sweetman, the former United Irishman, died at the age of seventy-four in May 1826 in Dublin, and was buried at Swords, Co. Dublin.