and Italian. Sheehan is best remembered as a novelist; in his novel My New Curate, he recounts an incident of a clerical appointment that may well be autobiographical and refer to his arrival in Doneraile: "The Bishop sent for me and said, with what I would call a tone of pity or contempt, but he was incapable of either, for he was the essence of charity and sincerity: 'Father Dan, you are a bit of a literateur, I understand. Kilronan is vacant. You'll have plenty of time for poetising and dreaming there. What do you say to it?' I put on a little dignity, and though my heart was beating with delight, I quietly thanked his Lordship. But, when I had passed beyond the reach of episcopal vision, which is far stretching enough, I spun my hat in the air, and shouted like a schoolboy: 'Hurrah!'". Political activist Sheehan first became politically engaged after the passing of the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903, authored by William O'Brien MP., and set in motion by D. D. Sheehan MP. of Kanturk, the Canon encouraging and giving advice to local tenant farmers in the area around Doneraile to purchase their leases under the act from the local landlords. The success of land purchase in Cork was much to the frustration of John Redmond's Irish Party (IPP) who believed that a national Home Rule movement could not survive without social grievances and without the antagonism of Catholic and Protestant. Sheehan was a founder and leading member of the All-for-Ireland League (AFIL) launched by William O'Brien in 1910 in opposition to Redmond's party, O'Brien advocating the unity of Catholic and Protestant interests in all walks of Irish political, social and cultural life. Sheehan stood and spoke on platforms advocating the principles of the League, which returned eight Independent M.P.s in the December elections. Sheehan wrote the manifesto of the movement in a very long editorial for the first issue of the League's new newspaper, O'Brien's radical Cork Free Press in June 1910, which was a manifestation of Joseph Devlin's militantly Catholic Ancient Order of Hibernians, whose members were also members of the IPP, largely influencing its political course, particularly against any form of concessions to Ulster as advocated by the AFIL. The League, so successful in Cork, was less successful elsewhere. Its principles of establishing a movement of a new kind to attract rather than