Fionán Lynch (; 17 March 1889 – 3 June 1966) was an Irish revolutionary, barrister, politician and judge of the Circuit Court from 1944 to 1959, Leas-Cheann Comhairle of Dáil Éireann from 1938 to 1939, Minister for Lands and Fisheries from 1928 to 1932, Minister for Fisheries from 1922 to 1928, Minister without portfolio from August 1922 to December 1922 and Minister for Education from April 1922 to August 1922. He served as a Teachta Dála (TD) from 1918 to 1944. Early life Lynch was born on 17 March 1889 in Cahersiveen, County Kerry. He was the seventh of eleven children to his parents Finian Lynch and Ellie McCarthy, the master and mistress of the new national school in the townland of Kilmakerrin, near Cahersiveen, in County Kerry. His father, Finian Lynch, was the younger son of Partalan Lynch, a stonemason, farmer and hedge school teacher, who had purchased some land from the O’Connell estate at Kenneigh in Kerry, between Cahersiveen and Waterville on the Ballinskelligs side of the road and north of the river Inny. His elder brother became a stonemason but Finian trained as a teacher in Dublin. His mother, Ellie McCarthy was the daughter of the teachers in the national school at Spunkane, near Waterville. She was born in 1853 and went to Dublin to train as a teacher. Education He grew up bilingual, speaking mostly in Irish at home, but in English at school. He was initially educated in the parent's school in Kilmakerrin but subsequently went to St Brendan's College, Killarney and then, at the age of 14 in about September 1903, to the Holy Ghost Fathers School at Rockwell College, County Tipperary. In 1907, he finished for one year with the Holy Ghost Fathers in Blackrock College, Dublin. He had planned to study medicine, but in 1907, when he was 18 years old his father died and he did not have the money to pursue this career path. Instead, when he was 18, he went to Swansea in Wales and taught in a parish school, not as a trained teacher, but as a well-educated young man, before returning to Ireland in 1909, where he started training as a teacher in St Patrick's College, Dublin. He graduated in 1911 as a primary school teacher and took up a teaching position in Dublin in April 1912, in St. Michan's School, Halston Street near North King Street,