Timothy Sullivan (Irish judge)
Chief Justice of Ireland (1874–1949)

Timothy Michael Sullivan (25 August 1874 – 12 May 1949) was an Irish judge who served as Chief Justice of Ireland from 1936 to 1946, a Judge of the Supreme Court from 1924 to 1946, President of the High Court and a Judge of the High Court from 1924 to 1936.
He was born in Dublin in 1874, the third surviving son among 17 children of Timothy Daniel Sullivan, a prominent Home Rule Party MP and Lord Mayor of Dublin and his wife Catherine Healy. He attended Belvedere College.
Through his sister Anne, who married Dr. Thomas Higgins, he was the uncle of Kevin O'Higgins and great-uncle of another Chief Justice, Tom O'Higgins. His mother was a sister of Tim Healy, the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State, and Sullivan in turn married their daughter Maeve.
He was called to the Bar in 1895.
In 1913, Sullivan married his niece Maev Healy, daughter of his sister Erina Catherine Sullivan and her husband Tim Healy. Maev was an artist who painted the well-known portrait of her husband in his judicial robes. They had no children.
“Timothy Sullivan (Irish judge)” enters the record as chief Justice of Ireland (1874–1949). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Timothy, Sullivan and Irish can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1558634. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1874, 1949, 1936 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Timothy Sullivan (Irish judge)” 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.