Matthias Finucane

Matthias Finucane (1737–1814) was an Irish barrister and judge of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is notable chiefly for divorcing his wife, which was an unusual move for the time.

Career He was born in Ennis, County Clare, the only son of Andrew Finucane (born 1680) and Joanna Hewitt. Though he is said to have owed his appointment to his friendship with John Fitzgibbon, 1st Earl of Clare, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, he was highly regarded as a judge. William Norcott, the barrister and poet, in his 1805 poem The Metropolis, praised him for his honesty and commonsense. He presided at a number of the trials resulting from the Irish Rebellion of 1798. After the failure of the Irish rebellion of 1803, he was one of the members of the Special Commission which was set up to try the rebels. He retired in 1806 and died in County Clare in 1814. on the grounds of her adultery with his cousin Lieutenant Donal Finucane. Anne and Donal subsequently married and had several children: she died at Boulogne in 1844. Although the act explicitly allowed Matthias to remarry, he never did so.

The judge's only son Andrew had no issue, and on his death in 1843 the family estates passed to the heirs of his sister Susanna Macnamara, who had died in 1819. Among her descendants was the author Caitlin Thomas, who married the celebrated poet Dylan Thomas.