The Hidden Ireland – A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century by Daniel Corkery

Author:Daniel Corkery [Corkery, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 2AFR, DSBF, D, LIT004120, 1DBR, HIS018000, DS, POE005020, DSC, HIS010020, HIS037050, DC, LIT014000, HBLL, HIS010000, LIT000000, HBJD1
ISBN: 9780717165766
Publisher: Gill
Published: 2015-06-25T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2: The Big House

I

Irish Ireland had become in the eighteenth century a peasant nation, harried and poverty-stricken, with the cottier’s smoky cabin for stronghold. But this does not mean that there were no longer any Big Houses, as we may call them, nor well-to-do families in these Gaelic-speaking countrysides. Both the stories of the poets’ lives and the songs they have left us save us from such an idea. Froude tells us that nine-tenths of the land was in 1703 held by Protestants of English or Scotch extraction, an estimate that is probably correct; yet here and there, and especially in Munster, certain big Gaelic Houses had escaped destruction; and only for they had, the story of Irish literature in that century would be very different from what it is, as gradually we shall come to realise.

Through sheer luck, it might be said, these houses had come to survive. They represented hardly ever the main branch of any of the historic families; they were rather the minor branches, far-removed, and not too well known to the authorities in Dublin. Those city-bred, sometimes English-bred, lawyers and statesmen had often only shadowy ideas of the boundaries of the lands they were confiscating. They were not quite sure when their work was done, either in seizing a property or re-parcelling it out among the adventurers. In Cork, in Kerry, and elsewhere, certain old Gaelic families survived not only as landowners but as local magnates right through all the confiscations and penal laws that followed on 1641 and, later, on the Boyne. They had succeeded in holding or getting back small portions of the lands from which their ancestors had been driven; and in many cases they must subsequently have quietly enlarged the property, however they had established themselves in it.

For such houses, in obscurity lay their chance of safety. The less that was known of them, especially in Dublin, the better their chance. Inquiry into the family’s history, or into the leases, would often have meant extinction; and how well they knew this, an anecdote told of the O’Connells of Derrynane — a house we shall often have to mention — will fix in our mind. Dr Smith, the eighteenth century historian of Cork and Kerry, penetrated into the mountains beyond Cahirciveen, and there partook of the O’Connells’ hospitality: we can imagine them as only gradually becoming aware of the Doctor’s interest in all that concerned their far places. Nothing could be so little to their taste. It is said that the historian, having set his eye on a pony of good shape, hinted that in exchange for the animal he would give the house honourable mention in his forthcoming work. They at once presented him with the pony, but only on the condition that his history was to be barren of their name. On a subsequent visit, they are said to have kicked him down the stairs.

II

In the invaluable book1 that tells the story of this family, we find their eighteenth century house in South Kerry thus described:

It must have resembled the House of the Seven Gables.

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