Dermot O'Hurley

Blessed Dermot O'Hurley
Archbishop of Cashel
Memorial plaque at St. Kevin's Church, Camden Row, Dublin
Archdiocese	Cashel
Appointed	September 1581
Term ended	19 or 20 June 1584
Predecessor	Maurice MacGibbon
Successor	David Kearney
Orders
Ordination	9 September 1581
Consecration	10 September 1581 by Pope Gregory XIII
Personal details
Born	c. 1530 Lickadoon Castle, Lickadoon, Ballyneety, Earldom of Desmond, Lordship of Ireland
Died	19 or 20 June 1584 Dublin, Ireland
Buried	St. Kevin's Church, Camden Row, Dublin, Ireland
Nationality	Irish
Denomination	Roman Catholic
Parents	William O'Hurley
Alma mater	University of Leuven
Sainthood
Feast day	20 June
Venerated in	Ireland
Title as Saint	Blessed
Beatified	27 September 1992 Vatican City by Pope John Paul II
Shrines	St. Kevin's Church, Camden Row, Dublin, Ireland

Dermot O'Hurley (c. 1530 – 19 or 20 June 1584)—also Dermod or Dermond O'Hurley, (Irish: Diarmaid Ó hUrthuile) (Elizabethan English: Darby Hurley or Dr. Hurley)^[1]—was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cashel during the Elizabethan era religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Ireland and who remains one of the most celebrated of the Irish Catholic Martyrs.

Born in the Earldom of Desmond as a member of the local Gaelic nobility of Ireland, O'Hurley was sent to Catholic Europe to continue his education, where he eventually became a professor of the Classics, philosophy, theology, and the law at the University of Rheims during the Counter-Reformation. Despite still being a layman, he was appointed by Pope Gregory XIII as Archbishop of Cashel during the ongoing Tudor conquest of Ireland.

After being ordained as a Roman Catholic priest and consecrated to the Episcopate by Thomas Goldwell, a Welsh Catholic refugee Bishop living in Rome, Archbishop O'Hurley was smuggled back into Ireland by a Breton sea captain from Le Croisic and deposited upon Holmpatrick Strand in what is now Skerries, County Dublin.

After a secret and underground religious ministry to both his fellow Gaels and the Old English population of The Pale, O'Hurley voluntarily surrendered himself in order to save one of his lay protectors, the Baron of Slane, from being imprisoned and executed in his place. After he was first imprisoned and tortured by being "put to the hot boots" in Dublin Castle, with the full knowledge and approval of the Queen, by Lord Justices Adam Loftus and Henry Wallop, Archbishop O'Hurley was sentenced to death by a drumhead court-martial. His death sentence was officially for high treason, but it was in reality for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, embrace the Elizabethan religious settlement, and accept the control over the Church by the State, which Queen Elizabeth I and her officials enforced at the time by defining Recusancy and even unspoken mental dissent as traitorous.

On the early morning of 19 or 20 June 1584, Archbishop O'Hurley was covertly taken outside the city walls of Dublin and hanged from a noose woven from green willow branches, near the modern junction of Lower Baggot Street and Fitzwilliam Street in what is now College Green. As soon as the news of his torture and execution spread, Archbishop O'Hurley was immediately revered as a Martyr throughout Catholic Europe.

After the successful fight for Catholic Emancipation between 1778 and 1829 finally ended the religious persecution that had begun under King Henry VIII, interest in Archbishop O'Hurley and the other Irish Catholic Martyrs during the preceding centuries revived. Due to the wealth of surviving documentation, Archbishop O'Hurley was considered one the most promising causes for Roman Catholic Martyrdom during the successive Apostolic Processes held in Dublin between 1904 and 1930, after which the results were submitted to the Holy See. On 27 September 1992, Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley was beatified by Pope John Paul II and remains one of the most celebrated of the 24 formally recognized Irish Catholic Martyrs. His feast day is June 20.