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Greetings,
Here's an explanation of why an "h" was added to your name, changing it from "Seachnasaigh" to "Sheachnasaigh."
First, you have to abandon the notion that the letter "h" in Irish means the same thing it does in English spelling. In Irish, it is used primarily as a sort of diacritic mark, indicating that the sound of the letter it follows has been changed in some fashion. (Actually, this is similar to the use of "h" in English after t, c, s, etc. -- what is vitally different is in _what_ fashion the sound has been changed.)
In Irish, the letter "h" is primarily used to mark the sound-change called "lenition" (literally "softening"), and originally for the most part the result of lenition was a sound that was a fricative equivalent of the original sound. So, for example, lenited "c" is spelled "ch" and pronounced like the "hard ch" in German "Bach" or Scottish "loch"; similarly lenited "b" is spelled "bh" and represents the fricative sound made in the same place as "b" -- as a rough approximation the English sound represented by v.
For two letters, however, lenition causes the letter to become entirely silent -- these letters are "f" and "s". So the spellings "fh" and "sh" are not pronounced at all. "ní Sheachnasaigh" is pronounced approximately "nee AW-nah-see" not "nee SHAW-nah-see".
In medieval and modern Irish, lenition strikes the learner as somewhat arbitrary in where it appears, but there is a pattern. In proto-Irish (which evolved into Old Irish around 600), lenition occurs mainly in words following vowels. Almost all the proto-Irish nouns ending in vowels were feminine, so most feminine Irish words cause the words following them to be lenited.
This is why the patronymics of women, but not men, are lenited.
Effric neyn Kenyeoch vc Ralte, Tangwystl verch Morgant Glasvryn, Lindorm Eriksson, Zenobia Naphtali, Talan Gwynek, Arval Benicoeur, Margaret MacDuibhsidhe, AElfwynn aet Gywrum, and Walraven van Nijmege contributed to this letter.
We hope this is an adequate explanation. This is actually a condensed version of the original response; if you would like more detail or found some of this unclear, please let us know.
In service,
Alan Fairfax
Academy of S. Gabriel