A GREAT LOSS? Undoubtedly, but to whom? Well, in different degrees to his wife, family, and his numerous friends, be they farmers, civil servants, scholars, local historians, scientists, authors, converationalists, book lovers and lovers of life in all its many forms. And those friends ranged widely, from herdsmen to university professors, from politicians to librarians, to archaeologists, ethnographers, veterinarians, genealogists, archivists, novelists and artists, to people from Cork, where he was born and reared, and the traditionally rival people from Kerry where he started out on his professional career as an agricultural adviser.
Also, of course, he numbered among his friends the Westmeath people into which he had married, and among whom he had worked for almost forty years until he retired in 1987. There was also the wide variety of good friends (everyone was a good friend with Jerry) who travelled through Moate.
Jeremiah Sheehan left us rather unexpectedly last month. He was an exceptional person, of exceptionally wide interests. Though an agricultural scientist by training and career, he was equally taken by the humanities, notably by history and local studies. Indeed, he successfully combined all three, agriculture, history and local studies, when he set about gathering a vast amount of valuable information about the local farming community among which he worked.
Largely at the instigation, and with the encouragement of, the late Professor T. P. O'Neill, of University College Galway, he wrote it all up and presented it for a master's degree in history in 1976; in 1978 the Blackwater Press published this research under the title South Westmeath: Folk and Farm. (He already had a degree in Agricultural Science).
But Jerry Sheehan also wrote other books, including Westmeath: As Others Saw It (1982), Worthies of Westmeath (1987), The Eskers of Ireland (1993), and the critical and historical text to accompany the beautiful watercolours by the late Fr. David Conaghan, O.Carm., published in 1991 under the title Moate and Its Neighbourhood. He also wrote much of the official Bord Failte Guide to Westmeath, and contributed to many other scholarly publications, some of which will appear posthumously. Furthermore, the Federation of Local History Societies, an all Ireland enterprise, has now lost the excellent editor of its annual Review.
An inspiring innovator with great energy, he was the deus ex machina for the launching of the highly successful Snowcream CoOp (now the Dawn Dairies) in Moate, the Moate Historical Society, the Moate Museum, and a number of related firming industries and environmental groups in a wide area. It will take several people to fill all the hats Jerry Sheehan so successfully, willingly and enthusiastically donned.
Despite all his time consuming interests and work, Jerry Sheehan was also a devoted family man, who with his wife Theresa raised a most friendly and successful family. Gabhaimis comhbhron leo agus guimis solas De ar anam ar gcara dilis, Jerry.