Buried Lives Read online

  The message was clear: they were no longer wanted. Most Irish historians seem to take a benign view of this fate: one of historical determinism, seeing Protestants as the victims of the inevitable march of victorious Catholic Gaelic nationalism and the defeat of British imperialism. David Fitzpatrick, in his admirable study of Co. Clare during the violence of 1920–23,161 omits to mention that since 1919, seventy out of eighty ‘Protestant landed families had left county Clare’.162 This was an overwhelming exodus. The eminent Irish historian Roy Foster, who edited the Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, seems not to have understood the deep feeling of abandonment southern Protestants felt after 1921. He is taken to task by Miriam Moffitt for not acknowledging the effects of partition on southern Protestants, rather highlighting the negative results for Catholics in Northern Ireland:

  Seen through Protestant eyes, the years 1870–1940 were a succession of humiliations … They perceived that their dominance in national politics had been taken from them … and after the passing of the local authority act of 1898, they were no longer the people of power in local politics.163

  Joseph O’Neill in his book, Dark Blood Stain, compares the treatment of Protestants to the persecution of Armenians and Christians in Cilicia, Turkey, arguing:

  … the migrant groups in Ireland and Turkey were remarkably similar. Both were minorities regarded as a fifth column of the foreign enemy; both suffered a demographic cataclysm unmentioned by dominant nationalist histories; and finally, both left a vestigial population in the new nation-state whose members instinctively understood that, whatever the political and constitutional affirmations to the contrary their citizenship was a matter of indulgence and not of right [my emphasis].

  This is eloquently put, but the scale was different. Well over 1 million Armenians and Christians were murdered in Turkey, by no means comparable to the small number murdered in Ireland. Nevertheless, arguably O’Neill is right in one sense: the trauma was comparable.

  Perhaps a more appropriate analogy is the exodus of United Empire Loyalists from the thirteen American colonies between 1775 and 1783. About 70,000 loyalists fled these colonies, with some 40,000 going to eastern Canada (Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia). They fled for reasons familiar to Southern unionists: intimidation, persecution, theft of goods and land and fear of changes to come and alienation on the basis of political principles.

  Both communities were faithful to the Crown, with some dependent on the Crown for their livelihoods. Many were farmers and shopkeepers; some were clergymen, some labourers.

  However, the Irish loyalists arguably suffered a comparatively harder fate. They had little compensation in the form of land grants given to Empire loyalists in Canada. They had to seek new lives with niggardly compensation. But they did share loss of home and country with Empire loyalists. To quote Ann MacKenzie:164

  Fleeing in panic and confusion, forced to leave behind most of their possessions and burdened with the prospect of building a new life in a new land, the Loyalists faced unpromising beginnings. The lands they were to settle were isolated, forbidding and wild.

  There are two major differences between the United Empire Loyalists and Southern unionists. Firstly, the United Empire Loyalists went on to build one of the leading nations of the world: Canada, renowned for its liberal democracy based on pluralism, toleration and constitutional nationalism. The Southern unionists, meanwhile, suffered defeat at the hands of physical force nationalists who went on to build a country for one race and one religion, purportedly speaking Gaelic; a nation whose progeny was romantic nationalism and was demographically overwhelmingly Catholic. Canada, in contrast, was an inclusive, multi-faith, multi-race country. In the Free State, in contrast, ‘This process of homogenization in turn had its own, very particular, consequences for social and cultural life in Ireland in the twentieth century.’165 Southern loyalists did little to help to build this new nation but rather spread to the Anglosphere, to form a new life where their attitudes found new welcoming homes.

  Secondly, the sharp decline in numbers of Southern Protestants caused by boycotting, murders and intimidation had a long-lasting effect on the ‘vestigial population’ which stayed on. It was a haemorrhage that left the community anaemic. According to Kurt Bowen, the initial stance of Protestants was ‘indignant marginality’, which ‘rapidly evolved into one of indifference, estrangement and apathy’. 166

  More than this, as mentioned earlier, the exodus ‘shattered the confidence of those who remained and undermined their determination to continue distinctive political activity … leaving Anglo-Ireland leaderless’.167 A once-confident people were in effect laid low.

  3

  A Chain of Bonfires

  Stephen Gwynn, the Irish National Party MP for Galway from 1906 to 1918, thought that the IRA campaign had been ‘wrong on all the great things’. It failed to achieve a united Ireland. Instead, through violent terrorist actions motivated by the wish to separate from Britain, Ireland was deeply and lastingly divided. Protestantism is associated with loyalism and that tradition included the Irish landlord class. According to Terence Dooley’s work The Decline of the Big House, between 1920 and 1923, the IRA burnt 276 of their houses,1 most of them architectural treasures built and designed by Irishmen. More were destroyed later.

  In Europe, and particularly in France, the castles and mansions of the aristocracy remained untouched during violent social upheavals and in revolutionary times. Some of their owners were guillotined, hanged or imprisoned, but their chateaux stand to this day, most of them lovingly restored. In the Loire valley, you can feast your eyes on countless Renaissance and classical period chateaux. Amboise, Azay-le-Rideau, Blois, Chambord, Chenonceux, Cheverny and Valency; all stand as tributes to the rich, varied architecture and rich social life of past eras. All are cared for by the State and most are open to the public all year round, with guided tours and nominal admission charges. The National Trust in Britain similarly maintains the architectural heritage of Britain, from smaller domestic buildings to the many vast castles and mansions of the former ruling class.

  In Ireland the situation was different. The mansions of the Irish ascendancy were mostly owned and cared for by people separated from the native Irish by religion as well as class, unlike France, where class – not religion – was the main divisive factor. In addition, the ascendancy class (who became known as ‘planters’), unlike previous invaders such as the Norse and the Normans, were not easily assimilated, nor allowed to assimilate, largely because the Reformation did not take root in Ireland. Essentially, the Protestant ascendancy were and are considered an alien people. Daniel O’Connell called Protestants ‘alien’, considering the true Irish to be Catholics. Protestantism profoundly divided the Irish ‘planters’ from the English Normans and the Gaelic Irish, who were Roman Catholics. Unlike in the neighbouring island, the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church were not enforced by an English government that was too remote and half-hearted to enforce them effectively. An unsustained approach was taken and there were a number of reasons for this. There was ‘the question of whether effective power and resources existed … for the imposition of the Protestant faith in meaningful terms.’ 2 Unlike Wales, where the Reformation took route, ‘Ireland had not been thoroughly subjugated in the medieval period’.3 The popular myth that Ireland was conquered and oppressed for 800 years was shown to be untrue in the sixteenth century. Had subjugation succeeded, the Reformation would have been enforced by Tudor monarchs. In reality, their hold on the island was confined to the east. Instead of courting the Catholic Irish chiefs, the Tudors antagonised them. A policy of compulsion was pursued, not awards of more power for supporting the Reformation. ‘The Reformation came to be seen as an English, foreign imposition.’4 Catholicism bound the old English and Gaelic Irish, hostile to an imposed Tudor Protestantism. ‘Catholicism now came to be seen as essential to the definition of true Irishness, an emblem which was to last into the history of Irish nationalism.’5 Lastly, the Irish langua
ge was not used in spreading the Reformation doctrines. The vernacular was not used in evangelism and the New Testament was not available in Irish until 1603.

  The penal laws of the eighteenth century did little to reduce the power of Irish Catholicism, which by then was deep rooted. They denied political power and landlord status to Roman Catholics, as well as Protestant Dissenters such as Presbyterians, but we now know that laws preventing freedom of worship were more often breached than observed. Roman Catholics were free to pursue commercial careers, and many became highly prosperous merchants, as the historian James Lydon has made clear.6

  Many large Roman Catholic landowners converted after the Reformation in order to retain their lands. By 1731 the ‘convert rolls’ listed 704, among them some leading gentry families. Their Roman Catholic contemporaries did not condemn many of these turncoats. The O’Hara family of Cooperstown in Sligo was one of many such families that did not lose the support of their tenants when they became Anglicans, as they still are to this day. Some landlords, even large ones, remained Catholics and suffered.

  Ireland was the home of these landlords who saw their Irish identity as being important, although ambiguous and multi-layered. They considered themselves to be Irish and intermarried with the Irish. It was religious affiliations that separated them from the majority of their neighbours, religion being the never-ending source of division in Ireland. But they were mostly conscientious and careful to fulfil their duties to their tenants, some even bankrupting themselves during the Famine.

  Here is what Alexis FitzGerald wrote about their tradition in University Review 1958:

  There is nothing unchristian in the constructive Anglo-Irish tradition but much that was fine and much that was a stimulus to noble living – much that confirms the Christianity of the common people of Ireland.

  By 1920, Irish landlords had sold most of their estates to their tenants under the terms of various land acts and particularly the Wyndham Act, which by 1920 had transferred almost 9 million acres to tenants on generous terms for both landlords and tenants. However, despite the loss of power and land, many in the IRA and Sinn Féin between 1920 and 1923 – and for years thereafter – thought that the hyphenated ‘Anglo-Irish’ were an alien people (the new, early twentieth-century descriptor ‘Anglo-Irish’ designed to exclude this class) and proceeded to burn down many of their mansions. Bruce Arnold, the author and columnist, wrote about these burnings:

  Three generations ago, we had a national field sport of burning down all the great houses and forcing their former owners to leave Ireland if we did not send them on their way to heaven or hell. Even as the country carried out this pyrotechnic dance of triumph there was some realisation that a symbiotic relationship existed, and always exists, between what was being assaulted and those who assaulted it.7

  ‘Any idiot with petrol and a match can set fire to a house’, commented Monk Gibbon. ‘It needs trained architects, masons and carpenters to build a house. The latter class of technical competence is rare, the former are numerous.’

  W.B. Yeats was unambiguous when writing about the destruction of the large Irish houses. One such place was Coole Park, the residence of the nationalist author and playwright and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory, whose husband was a pillar of the British Empire. It was demolished in 1941. Yeats wrote, ‘To kill a house where great men grew up, married and died, I here declare a capital offence.’

  As a class, the Irish landlords lacked the ability and the will to defend themselves, unlike the unionist community in Northern Ireland. They were too small in number, and the various security forces – whether British or Irish – were so stretched during this period of upheaval and anarchy that there was little they could do to protect them. In fact, actions of the Black and Tans and Auxiliary police forces too often led directly to tit-for-tat burnings of the big houses, which were seen to represent the British garrison in Ireland.

  Much of the country’s finest architecture went up in flames during the Troubles and the Civil War. From 1920 until 11 July 1921, when the truce was declared, 76 big houses were burned. Between January 1922 and April 1923, 192 more were burned. In all, some 500 mansions were burned, abandoned or damaged beyond repair during the twentieth century, including 37 houses belonging to senators in the new Free State parliament. There were approximately 2,000 big houses in the 26 counties, so some 25 per cent of the total were left in ruins. Of these, about 30 were rebuilt with the compensation that the owners received, either from the Free State or from the Irish Grants Committee in London. These burnings had the effect of enforcing the emigration of many Protestants. The County Inspector of Cork wrote in May 1921: ‘Loyalists are being persecuted, their mansions and houses are being burned, and a huge number of them have cleared out of the country’.8

  There were several reasons for burning the houses. Some were burned to prevent the British Army from occupying them. A famous example was the magnificent Summerhill in Co. Meath, where the Empress Elizabeth of Austria went to hunt in the summers of 1879 and 1880. It has been described as ‘the most dramatic of the great Irish Paladian houses, probably designed by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce in collaboration with Richard Castle.’9 (There is a picture of Summerhill in the Emperor of Austria’s palace in Vienna.) It was burnt on 4 February 1920, when 30 gallons of petrol was poured all over the floors and windows were opened to ensure the flames would spread quickly. The owner, Lord Langford, was away and fortunately the servants escaped any harm. It was said that the house was burnt because Michael Collins’ spies in Dublin had heard British forces were going to occupy it to commence a campaign of counter-insurgency in the area. However, according to Lady Fingall, author of the book Seventy Years Young, the owner of Summerhill had persuaded the British military authorities not to quarter soldiers there. Unfortunately the letter accepting this decision was not seen by the IRA spies in Dublin Castle in time. It was said that locals burned down the house and that paintings, silver and furniture were stolen and scattered among local houses. Lord Langford left Ireland, never to return. The spectacular ruins were demolished in around 1957, an act of erasure of magnificent Irish architecture – a mansion built by Irish craftsmen – destroyed by Ireland’s new people, putting behind them its former people and stealing their furniture and silver.

  Others were torched in retaliation for the burning of the houses of suspected IRA men, such as Moydrum Castle in Westmeath, the home of Lord Castlemaine, Dunboy Castle in Castletownbere, west Cork, and 7 houses in Innishannon, west Cork. But undoubtedly a major motive was agrarian greed, an example being the house of the popular landlord, Beaumont-Nesbitt, Tubberdaly, in Laois and Derrycastle in Co. Tipperary. Landlord Shawe Taylor was murdered because he refused to part with his estate in Portumna. According to Dr Terrence Dooley, who has researched the motivation behind the destruction of the Anglo-Irish mansions, ‘by 1923, land grabbing was endemic’. Patrick Hogan informed President W.T. Cosgrave that ‘the shooting of Land Commission officials [had] become widespread’ and ‘house burning [had] become a matter of course’. In Dooley’s book The Decline of the Big House in Ireland, Hogan claimed that he had ‘noted the cases throughout the country where houses have been burned and in more than 50 per cent of these cases the circumstances make it plain enough that the destruction was not for political but for agrarian motives’.10

  Others were destroyed after their valuable contents had been removed, like the magnificent Mitchelstown Castle, Co. Cork, one of the largest and most sumptuous mansions in Ireland and the home of the King Harmans. In fact, over a third of the houses burnt were in Co. Cork. Mitchelstown Castle was burnt after the Irregulars had occupied it in August 1922 in order, so they said, to prevent the Free State army from occupying it when they left. Its many valuables were stolen and were destined to adorn houses around Mitchelstown. Pictures were desecrated: a large Rembrandt had broken glass thrown at it. Edith Somerville commented at the time that ‘lavatories being considered useless institutions, the walls of th
e corridors were used instead’.

  The Ponsonby family in Castle Mary, Cloyne, Co. Cork built and owned Castle Mary, which was the home of Rita Flower, a striking lady who had inherited it from her father, Colonel Longfield. They were the local landed gentry in the parish in which my father was Dean and where I lived from 1950 to 1963. Their family had come to Ireland from Wales after the English Civil War, the first owner being John Longfield, a Williamite. They held land around Mallow and around Cloyne, stretching to the picturesque fishing village of Ballycotton, which they once owned. The estate grew to 10,813 acres by 1873, including land in Louth and Kerry. When Longfield died, he left 670 acres to his eldest daughter, Rita, as various land acts had ensured that he sold most of his land to his tenants. Rita married a Ponsonby related to the aristocratic Bessboroughs in Co. Kilkenny. She had one son, Arthur, who inherited Castle Mary. Arthur’s father Myles fell in the Great War in 1915 at Loos when Rita was only 24, and she remarried in 1918 to a Neville Flower.

  Castle Mary house was added to the long list of mansions burnt by the IRA when in September 1920, two maids staying in the castle on their own were roused one night and given ten minutes to clear out. They placed a few paintings near the door and left in a hurry. The men then proceeded to help themselves to the contents of the house and burnt it to the ground. No one seems to know who was responsible; whether it was the official IRA or some local lads in the nearby village of Ballinacurra. Whatever, it had the desired effect: it broke the spirit of Rita’s father, Mountifort Longfield. In the words of his relative Jane Hayter Hames: