Thomas Connellan (priest)
Irish writer
Rev. Thomas Connellan (1855 – 11 January 1917) was an Irish writer and Catholic priest, who left the church to become a clergyman of the Church of Ireland.
Life
He was born in the parish of Geevagh, County Sligo. During his teenage years he went through was he called a "troubled time". He was educated in Athlone Diocesan School and Maynooth College and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest for the diocese of Elphin on 20 June 1880.
On 20 September 1887 he disappeared, leaving his clothes in a boat on Lough Ree. He was supposed to have been drowned, which attracted great attention at the time, and had the unlooked-for result of procuring some remarkable obituary notices in the Roscommon Messenger and other papers. The Town Board, Borough Court, and Board of Guardians all adjourned, as a mark of respect to his memory, while the Vicar-General of the diocese wrote a most sympathetic letter to his father. In fact he had fled to London, after which he became a member of the Church of Ireland.
He edited a paper called The Catholic, which had a considerable circulation, and wrote Hear the Other Side and a number of other books and pamphlets, which had a wide circulation.
The public source identifies “Thomas Connellan (priest)” as irish writer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Thomas, Connellan and priest.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7317690. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1855, 1917, 1880 and 1887.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Connellan (priest)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.