Terence Dooley’s Burning the Big House smoulders with insight – and occasional cliches

Author Terence Dooley, perhaps Ireland’s foremost architectural historian

Burning the Big House, by Terence Dooley

Author Terence Dooley, perhaps Ireland’s foremost architectural historian

Burning the Big House, by Terence Dooley

Author Terence Dooley, perhaps Ireland’s foremost architectural historian

Kevin Myers

May 22 2022 02:30 AM

Burning the Big House Terence Dooley Yale University Press, €35

Monetary innumeracy is a defining feature of armed Irish Republicanism. None of the heroes who set the Irish night skies blazing with the timbers of some 300 great houses from 1919 to 1923 grasped that the cost of their frolics would be borne by local ratepayers. So, the final gift to the departing gentry was a tax-free capital sum courtesy of the Irish people whose public servants were meanwhile taking a 10pc pay cut to make this largesse possible.

Political ignorance accompanied this fiscal stupidity. Irish landlordism had been doomed by the Land Acts, leading to the greatest land transfer in European history. Yet the perception endured among atavistic Fenians and some vendetta-cherishing small farmers that yet more land was available if only they got rid of the remaining grandees, with architectural ruin resulting.

Terence Dooley, perhaps Ireland’s foremost architectural historian, identifies class, religion, agrarianism, military necessity, personal dislike and greed as motives for this cultural calamity. As Kevin O’Higgins ruefully recognised at the time, perhaps the most potent is the mob which lures hitherto peaceful participants into performing insane acts of violence, as in Ireland then, the US in 2020 or England in 2011.

Moreover – as the gender-apartheid of barbecues attests – men like burning things, but what political incendiary would subsequently admit that as a reason for such unreasonable and impoverishing behaviours?

In an otherwise wise, informed and extremely insightful work, Terence Dooley occasionally resorts to baseless clichés.

Fourteen “intelligence operatives” were not assassinated on Bloody Sunday: that is republican propaganda. He repeatedly refers to that fictional entity the “Black and Tans” (which never served as a unit, but were assimilated into the RIC), and which he blames for the burning of various towns like Trim and Balbriggan, where the actual culprits were RIC Auxiliaries, who existed as a freestanding entity, separate from the RIC.

He says of Castlefogarty in Tipperary: “The Irish Times had reported that it had been occupied by the Black and Tans.” In fact, it reported in April 1922 that the house had been held by “the military and police until February 1922”; then it was occupied by the IRA which makes its subsequent destruction even more fatuous than usual.

Burning the Big House, by Terence Dooley

It is similarly a pity that he does not give the appalling Tom Barry the monstrous credit that he merits. Barry did not “kill” 18 Auxiliaries, but slaughtered unarmed men who had surrendered, an atrocity which would serve as the authoriser of the state-barbarism that would follow.

Video of the Day

In his tendentiously foul memoirs, Barry boasted that he feared running short of loyalist houses to burn, with the implication that he was talking of Big Houses. He was not. On a night of unimaginable terror in 1921, Barry’s armed men fell on the tiny village of Innishannon, Co Cork, and set fire to five “loyalist” homes, none of which were Big Houses. Yet, investigating this horror some 30 years ago, I found no-one in the village had even heard of it.

Similarly, Dooley writes of the local myth that Ballydugan House in Galway was uniquely (for a Big House) burnt by “the Black and Tans” (sigh) when it was actually burnt in 1922 by land-hungry locals. As late as 2014, historian Ann O’Riordan found that this fiction still brooked no contradiction.

Much the same is said locally of Woodstock in Kilkenny and no doubt elsewhere. Guilt-transference through shared shame is of course a vital weft as the myth-maker’s loom moves with wondrous selectivity across history’s landscape, prudently choosing which yarns to exclude from the final fabric.

For example, in 1921, under the wicked British, after Moydrum House in Westmeath had been burnt, two servants, Michael Grady and Patrick Delany, were found guilty of stealing a fur coat and other items from the smouldering ruins and sentenced to four- and six-months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

In 1923, in newly independent Ireland, three youngsters – William Conroy, Patrick Cunningham and Col(u)m Kelly – were convicted of stealing a silver watch and money “with other goods and chattels” during armed raids in Ballycowan and were shot by a Free State firing squad. Presidential observations on the centennial of this little affair next year should be exceedingly interesting.

Of the 20pc loss of the 1,500 great Irish houses, Dooley remarks: “This begs the question as to why many more were not destroyed.” It begs no such questions. As elections have repeatedly shown, most Irish people have never sought violence or destruction. It required a combination of Fenian witchcraft, local yahoo-ism and astounding military stupidity to bring about this tragic house-burning frenzy. But with the British gone, this lunacy actually accelerated during the Civil War, as Ireland embarked on a 40-year pilgrimage of impoverishment, philistinism, clericalism and emigration.

A century on, the authors of this needless immiseration are the heroes of not merely a still-sulphurous Sinn Féin, now the most popular party on the island, but of Official Ireland also. Surely, a time to worry.