The two were the figureheads of a very personalised rivalry in the 1980s between Fianna Fial and Fine Gael. Haughey was framed as the brash populist and Fitzgerald the cerebral liberal.

As we discuss though, the two men shared a great deal in common in terms of background and developmental strategy. While they ostensibly clashed over social issues and how to bring peace to Northern Ireland, there was much posturing, particularly from Haughey’s side, that masked a broad agreement in terms of policy.

Eoin O’Malley is an Associate Professor in political science at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. There he teaches politics and public policy.

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John Dorney and Cathal Brennan talk about the evolution of the Fenian movement from 1867 until the early 1900s. Part one here. First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

We talk about the Fenians on both sides of the Atlantic attempts to recover from the debacle of the 1867 rebellion.

What emerged were essentially two tendencies. One favoured a broad front approach known as the ‘New Departure’ in which the Fenians’ resources were thrown behind the Land League and later Home Rule campaigns in Ireland.

The other, very largely funded from the United States, favoured small scale armed action, including the Phoenix Park assassinations in Dublin and the ‘Dynamite campaign’ in Britain itself.

Both approaches left their mark. Attacks in Britian especially undoubtedly made a political impact in British politics but were widely condemned by many Fenians.

The Land League and Home Rule movement cemented a democratic nationalist movement in Ireland but Irish Republicans gradually grew dissillusioned with the failure to advance the goals of full Irish independence.

Towards the late nineteenth century, militant Fenianism in Ireland died down and the Irish Republican Brotherhood regrouped around the ideas of cultural nationalism and infiltrating new organisations such as the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association.

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This year marks the 150^th anniversary of probably the most daring prison escape ever thought up by an Irish man; that of the springing of six Irish Fenian political prisoners from a British run maximum security prison in Fremantle, Western Australia to freedom in the United States on the whaling vessel Catalpa.

The background to the imprisonment was that the six, James Wilson, Robert Cranston, Thomas Hassett, Martin Hogan, Thomas Darragh, and Michael Harrington were all members of the British army and consequently were convicted of treason felony for joining in the Fenian movement, aimed at ending British rule in Ireland in 1866.

Initially sentenced to death this was later commuted to life penal servitude in Fremantle, Western Australia. Between 1869 and 1871 pardons were granted to most of the imprisoned Fenians but these prisoners labelled as ‘military’ were not included and were amongst the last of the Fenian prisoners held there.

Fremantle was selected by the British for its naturally inhospitable environment as sitting between the shark-filled Indian ocean on one side and the desert like scrublands on the other, it made for easy policing. There was virtually no way out for a would-be escapee plus the authorities were able to utilise the prisoners for heavy labour purposes outside the prison during the day without fear of escape.

Eventually one of the six James Wilson managed to smuggle a letter out via a sympathetic priest to John Devoy, a leading Fenian, at that time working as a journalist in New York, pleading for a rescue attempt. In cahoots with John Boyle O’Reilly, a Fenian and rarity as a Fremantle escapee (1869) now living in Boston, they managed to raise funds and purchase a merchant ship, Catalpa.

They converted the ship to a whaling vessel and employed an American, sympathetic to the cause, George Smith Anthony, a twenty-eight-year-old whaling boat captain, to set sail for Rockingham in Western Australia on the 29^th April 1875, a distance of over 20,000 kilometres.

Devoy and Boyle O’Reilly concocted a clever ruse. First, they sent two Fenians, John Breslin and Thomas Desmond, ahead to Perth. Posing as wealthy businessmen, under the pseudonyms Collins and Johnson they were able to make contacts on the ground, note any security gaps and generally put it about that they would be needing manual labourers over the course of their business venture. Breslin even managed to make a number of visits into the prison itself under the guise of seeking such labour.

During those visits he managed to convey to the six men that on the 17^th April 1876, they must ensure that they were part of prison labour gangs working outside the prison. As part of the preparation, they even arranged to have the telegraph wires cut between Fremantle and Perth on the date in question to slow down any possible reporting of the incident to the authorities.

On the 17^th April as promised Catalpa and a small rescue boat manned by Captain George Smith Anthony and a small team stood off shore in readiness. Breslin waited at an agreed spot with a horse and wagon. Wilson and the five others, Cranston, Darragh, Harrington, Hogan, and Hassett having escaped their work gang, rushed to the meeting point whereupon they jumped into the wagon and sped to the waiting rescue boat at Rockingham beach.

Once they were aboard, the boat took off for the Catalpa but got caught up in a raging sea storm by which time the authorities were onto them. Unable to make it to the Catalpa they spent the night tossing on the turbulent ocean. At morning light as the storm died down, they made their way towards the Catalpa only to find themselves being hotly pursued by the armed  Steamer the Georgette, which had been commandeered by the colonial governor.

Miraculously, the small rescue boat was not spotted as the Georgette made straight for the Catalpa instead on to which they were refused access on the basis that they were outside the colony’s 3-mile limit. The Georgette was then forced to return to shore to refuel. However, early on the 19^th the now refuelled Georgette again followed the Catalpa drawing alongside it and demanding that the prisoners be handed over, even firing a warning shot across its bow.

George Anthony, knowing that they would easily be out-armed, instead hoisted the American flag up the mast and declared that any attempt to fire on it would be regarded as an act of war against the United States. The officers on board the Georgette had to admit defeat at this point and retreat whilst Catalpa sailed away into the Indian Ocean, and towards freedom in New York.

On receiving the news of the successful rescue on the 6^th June, John O’Boyle Reilly immediately released the news to the press. This prompted huge celebrations in the United States and in Ireland but was met by outrage in both Britain and Australia. Nonetheless, no diplomatic issues arose between the States and Britain as a result of the actions of Captain George Anthony.

The arrival of the Catalpa into New York on 19^th August 1876 was greeted by thousands of cheering Americans and republican sympathisers who lined the harbour to welcome them.

The six men remained on in the United States integrating into society there rather than risking re-arrest by returning to Britain or Ireland. Most would remain active in the republican movement and they continued to be treated as heroes by the American diaspora for the rest of their lives.

Having recently attended the absolute masterpiece, Catalpa, a one-man epic rendition by the actor Donal O’Kelly, with music and sound effects by Trevor Knight in the Civic Theatre, I was totally spellbound. If you are fortunate enough to get an opportunity to experience this play for yourself, you will be treated to a marvellous insight into the sheer brilliance of those who pulled of this incredible feat, 150 years ago this year.

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John Dorney and Cathal Brennan discuss the Irish Republican or Fenian Brotherhood from its inception in 1858 to its failed rebellion of 1867. First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

We discuss how the Brotherhood drew on the memory of the United Irishmen of the 1790s an grew more directly out of the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s. We argue, however, that it was the Fenians who really invented modern Irish Republicanism, with all of its contradictions.

It was a secular, even anti-clerical movement, that also appealed to a deeply Catholic communal Irish identity. It appealed to universal enlightenment values while also professing armed separatist nationalism. Its origin were in urban Ireland, where it predominated among the skilled working class and radical intellectuals, but it built its demographic strength in rural Ireland by appealing to the social and economic concerns of tenant farmers and labourers.

This and more, we discuss, as well as the role of the Brotherhood’s counterpart in America Clan na Gael, the Fenian raids into Canada, the attempted insurrection of March 1867 and the execution of Manchester martyrs.

See also, the Fenians, an Overview.

Part two of our podcast series on the Fenians here.

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By Brendan Farrell

Following the execution of Roger Casement for high treason in 1916. WB Yeats immortalised the Irish patriot in verse. one of the stanzas possibly connects Casement to the graveyard of Nuns cross church in County Wicklow.

The ghost of Roger Casement Is beating on the door.

I poked about a village church And found his family tomb

And copied out what I could read In that religious gloom;

Found many a famous man there; But fame and virtue rot. Draw round, beloved and bitter men, Draw round and raise a shout

As highlighted by Michael Neill; Professor of early English literature, University of Kent/Emeritus professor, early English literature Auckland and author of A Hyphenated Identity:

“there is in fact no actual village church with a Casement family tomb – not in Antrim, the home of the Casements, nor, it seems even in Cork, from where Casement’s maternal line supposedly came.”

The newly married Casements; Julius, first cousin and Maria Clarke, née Lacey-Bernard had settled in  the village of Ashford, moving to Cronroe house, now the Bel-air hotel, in 1862.  The young Roger had grown very close to the couple and would spend time relaxing in the large Georgian house. The present Victorian edifice was built in 1890 following an accidental fire which completely destroyed the original building.

Unsurprisingly, as an ascendancy family with strong ecclesiastical connections, there are family members interred at Nuns cross church, The gothic revival building dates from 1817 and was originally financed by J.M Synge’s Great Grandfather Francis Synge.

Nuns Cross Church, Killiskey

The Yeats family were intimately familiar with the area; W.B  and J.M. Synge were central pillars of the Irish Literary Revival and co-founders of the Abbey theatre. The painter, Jack B Yeats was also a close friend and associate of the playwright. Synge and Yeats would collaborate as writer and illustrator on a number of projects documenting the people of Ireland and notably, following a commission by the Guardian Newspaper; a series of essays highlighting the extreme poverty of the “congested districts” in the West of Ireland.

Synge’s ancestral home, Glanmore Castle is located nearby. The aqua tint of Glanmore Castle is part of the Yeats Family collection. The castle library housed an extremely extensive and important collection of books at the time, which would have exerted an irresistible draw on the intellectually curious appetites of the Yeats brothers and Synge.

WB Yeats observation that the martyrdom of Casement would fan the flames of Irish Nationalism was certainly very prescient and Casement’s ghost would indeed come knocking on England’s door along with the 15 other leaders of the 1916 Easter rebellion who were martyred by a British firing squad.

Casement is undoubtably one of the most controversial and enigmatic figures in Irish history. Born in Sandycove Co Dublin in 1864, to Roger Casement, a staunch Protestant British army Captain and Anne Jephson, a Roman Catholic mother, who defiantly had the five-year-old Roger and his siblings secretly baptised as Roman Catholics.

The untimely death of his mother in 1873, necessitated a move back to the Antrim homeland of his father. Roger, his two brothers, Charles and Thomas and sister Agnes were made wards of their wealthy Uncle, John Casement, of Magherintemple house.   The nine-year-old Roger was enrolled as a boarder at the Ballymena diocesan school, where he excelled; winning prizes in classical studies and developing a love for Poetry and History, however, his formal education would be tragically curtailed following the death of his father in 1877.

In 1912, Casement, in answer to a request for a donation from his former headmaster would respond politely but scathingly, excoriatingly condemning, his alma mater as “anti Nationalist”:

“I was taught nothing about Ireland in Ballymena School – I don’t think the word was ever mentioned in a single class of the school – and all I know of my country I learned outside the school. I do not think that is a good or healthy state of mind in which to bring up the youth of any country – and while it endures, as it unhappily does, in so many of the schools in Ireland – which are in but not of Ireland, we shall see our country possessing inhabitants fit to succeed and prosper in every country but their own – citizens of the world, maybe, but not of Ireland.”

Excerpt from a letter to Mr. W.A. Fullerton head master.

In 1880,the orphaned Fifteen-year-old would, prevailing upon the kindness of his maternal relatives, Grace and Edward Bannister in Liverpool, find employment as a clerk in the offices of the  prestigious Merseyside, Elder Dempster Shipping Company, significantly, the main British carrier for West African trade and eventually a springboard for his introduction to Africa and his illustrious career as a global humanitarian.

Joining the British Foreign Service in 1892 would prove life changing; as a consular official he would be exposed to some of the worst examples of human depravity and for twenty years  Casement played a leading role in exposing the abuse of native peoples in the Congo and the Putumayo region of the Amazon, where murder, mutilation, torture and rape were commonly used by companies exploiting the natural resources of these areas.

In The Congo, which became the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium. Reports of atrocities committed by company agents against indigenous people were causing consternation amongst the Western Liberal classes. In 1903, Casement was despatched by the British Government to investigate allegations of brutality made against the Belgian King. “The Casement report” would prove to be an incendiary exposé, igniting feelings of revulsion and protest across the World. His humanitarian work would be recognized by awards of a CMG and in 1911, a Knighthood.

Prior to his retirement in 1913, he had become increasingly aware of the injustices in his own native land and had become involved with fellow humanitarian and nationalist, Alice Stopford Green. He had also become a member of the Gaelic League where he met and formed a friendship with Dr Douglas Hyde, President of the League.

By the end of 1913, Casement had joined the ranks of the Irish Volunteers, as a member of the Provisional Committee and was actively involved in recruitment and fund raising for the inevitable armed rising, which he deemed necessary to ensure the introduction of home rule. From a fund initially kick-started by personal donations from Casement and “The O’Rahilly”, rifles were purchased from the German Government with the aim of importing them using private yachts: The Asgard owned by Erskine Childers and The Kelpie owned by a cousin of Childers’ wife Mary Spring Rice, a daughter of Baron Mounteagle. 

The Asgard landed in Howth on 26^th July 1914 and with assistance from the 4^th  battalion, Dublin brigade, Irish volunteers, unloaded, 900 Mauser, Model 1871 rifles. My Great Uncle, James Glynn, was a member of the 4^th battalion and participant in the rising; fighting alongside Cathal Brugha and William Cosgrave under the leadership Of Eamonn Ceannt at the South Dublin Union. The single shot rifles were obsolete by 1914 standards, in contrast to the 25,000 modern, technically superior German supplied rifles which were issued to the Ulster Volunteer force in April 1914, along with millions of rounds of ammunition. The cargo of The Kelpie was transferred to another yacht, The Chotah owned by Sir Thomas Myles. President of the Royal College of Surgeons, which landed safely in Kilcoole, Co. Wicklow.

Meanwhile, Casement was in the USA raising funds and meeting with John Devoy, an ardent republican and leader of Clan na Gael. Devoy, had contacted the German Ambassador requesting German support to overthrow British rule.

Casement’s subsequent visit to Germany with Thomas Clarke’s envoy, Robert Monteith, and his intention to recruit newly imprisoned Irish P.O. W’s into an Irish brigade, would prove largely unsuccessful and the rejection of German intervention would leave him disillusioned and deeply pessimistic about the planned rising.

“The Irish Brigade would only fight for the cause of Ireland and may in no circumstances be used or commanded for a German aim.”                                                                                                           Roger Casement

In a last desperate attempt to solicit German help, in April 1915. Joseph Plunket would be despatched with a plan to use combined Irish and German forces to defeat the British. This would enable the Germans to establish Naval bases in Ireland for U- boats, which could effectively, isolate Britain from its vital Atlantic supply route. The plan was rejected with the Germans only agreeing to send another consignment of weapons. Despite the failure to secure meaningful German assistance the Rising was set for Easter Sunday.

Casement’s appeal to delay the rising until June was unsuccessful. Regardless of his deep foreboding, he had decided to join his comrades in the planned Easter rebellion. On the 15^{th of} April 1916, he boarded a German U-boat from Wilhelmshaven bound for Tralee Bay. The Libau, a cargo ship, disguised as a Norwegian vessel The Aud ,carrying 10 machine guns, 20,000 rifles and 100,000 rounds of ammunition was scheduled to rendezvous with the German submarine. The Aud had been intercepted by the British Navy and Casement along with Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey, a former soldier in the Royal Irish Rifles and ex P.O.W. were landed at Banna strand in County Kerry.

British Naval intelligence had been tipped off about an arms smuggling plot in the area and the RIC had been notified of men acting suspiciously in the locale, unsurprisingly, Casements insistence that he was an English writer researching a book on St Brendan did not convince the arresting Sergeant who retrieved three Mauser pistols from the rowing boat.

Casement’s extreme height of around two metres would also have made him conspicuously identifiable. Following his arrest, Sir Roger Casement CMG. Would be transferred to Tralee Gaol then onto The Tower of London.

The Aud’s cargo would be consigned to the deep, scuttled by the captain while under escort by the British Navy.

“When I landed in Ireland that morning . . . swamped and swimming ashore on an unknown strand, I was happy for the first time for over a year. Although I knew that this fate waited on me, I was for one brief spell happy and smiling once more. I cannot tell you what I felt. The sandhills were full of skylarks rising in the dawn, the first I had heard for years – the first sound I heard through the surf was their song as I waded in through the breakers, and they were rising all the time up to the old rath … and all round were primroses and wild violets and the singing of the skylarks in the air, and I was back in Ireland again.”

                                                                                                            Roger Casement

Casement’s melodramatic, internment in the Tower of London and the unsanitary conditions in which he was kept, would raise eyebrows amongst the Irish diaspora including prominent individuals; George Bernard Shaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and WB Yeats, who would appeal for a reprieve in light of Casements outstanding humanitarian record. However, all hopes were dashed before any public sympathy gained traction, by the release of the “Black Diaries” which purportedly explicitly catalogued homosexual affairs with amongst others, Alder Christensen, a servant employed by Casement. The deliberate release of the diaries certainly undermined any hopes of clemency in an era of virulent social conservatism and prejudice.

Casement’s trial at the old Bailey commenced on June 26^th, 1916, inevitably, it would be a choreographed show trial, especially considering the growing feelings of discontent over the recent summary executions of the 1916 rebel leaders. Casement rejected the legitimacy of the court arguing that the statute dating from 1351, under which he was charged with high treason, was legally ineffectual in Ireland:

 “If I did wrong in making the appeal to Irishmen to join with me in an effort to fight for Ireland, it is by Irishmen and them alone that I can be rightfully judged. It was not I who landed in England but the Crown who dragged me here, away from my own country. Place me before a jury of my own countrymen, be it Protestant or Catholic, Unionist or nationalist, Sinn Féineach or Orangemen, and I shall accept their verdict and bow to the statute and all its penalties”.

Roger Casement was sentenced to death and found guilty of treason. On the 3^rd August 1916, he was executed by hanging at Pentonville Prison, London after receiving the last rites as a Roman Catholic. His body was buried in quick lime in the Prison grounds.

49 years later, his remains were re-interred in Glasenevin cemetery with full military honours, his sacrifice and courage acknowledged by President De Valera and more than 30,000 respectful citizens of the Irish Republic.

J.M. Synge may not have been a Republican; his premature death in 1909 of hodgkinsons disease precluded him from choosing sides in 1916 however like Casement he fervently believed in the rights and welfare of his fellow man and his essays, highlighting The congested districts in 1905 with Jack Yeats certainly contributed to the rising opprobrium cumulating in the Birrell Land act 0f 1909.

WB Yeats would tirelessly campaign for Casements honour as illustrated in New Poems:

I say that Roger Casement, did what he had to do

He died upon the gallows but that is nothing new 

Afraid they might be beaten before the bench of time

They turned a trick by forgery and blackened his good name

 

In this,110th year since the execution of Roger Casement, amid the resurgence of autocracy and seeping pervasive control by sinister, self-serving monopolies – Is it time to invoke the Ghost of Roger Casement?

“Self government is our right. A thing born to us at birth, a thing no more to be doled out to us by another people than the right to life itself, than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers or to love our kind”.

Roger Casement

Brendan Farrell is a writer and castle proprietor with an eclectic background in publishing, Journalism and Engineering Project Management.

We discuss anti-Catholic legislaton from the 16th century Ireland to the anti-recusancy acts of the early 1600s through to the thorough destructon of the Catholic landowning class by the Cromwellian regime of the 1650s.

We then move on the the Penal Laws proper, enacted after the Williamite victory in the War of the Two Kings and how they create the conditions for a Protestant ruled Ireland in the 18th century.

We finish by discussing the gradual repeal of the Penal LAws, beginning in the 1770s and finishing with Catholic Emancipation in 1829, followed by the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to our Patreon page for The Irish Story if you would like to support our work.

UCD Press,

Dublin 2025

Reviewer: John Dorney

ISBN-13:9781068502347

The 1798 rebellion lasted just months, from May to September of that year. Its outbreaks were localised in various parts of the country, occurred at different times and each one was put down within weeks or even days in most cases. It is striking to be reminded that the Wexford Rising, the most determined, hard fought and celebrated of the outbreaks, lasted just over one month.

For all that, it was a seminal event in Irish history. As James Quinn remarks in his new history of the events of 1798, it was the most concentrated outbreak of political violence in Ireland in the last three hundred years.

The death toll, we learn in the chapter on the rebellion’s aftermath, was put by reliable contemporaries at ‘not less than 20,000’. While we have no ultimately reliable statistics to back this up and twentieth century studies by scholars such as Louis Cullen have sought to revise this total downwards somewhat, it was certainly, as the title of this book suggests, a very bloody summer. The vast majority of the dead, moreover, were either civilians or rebels. And the rebels themselves were basically civilians, often armed only with farm implements or home-made pikes and frequently cut down by grapeshot or musketry of Crown forces with no chance to respond.

Quinn’s book is also revealing about the wider suffering caused beyond the death toll. On top of the thousands of dead, tens of thousands more were injured, thousands more had their homes burned by military or the rebels, and thousands of United Irishmen were exiled, some to France or Prussia as soldiers, some as convicts to Australia. Quinn, clearly an animal lover, also has an affecting passage on the suffering of animals, cavalry horses impaled on pikes, cattle driven by the rebels into enemy cannon fire as a ‘bovine shield’, livestock killed and carried off by marauding fighters on both sides.

But the trauma of the events of the summer of 1798, is, of course, not the sum of their importance. The rebellion and the whole revolutionary decade of the 1790s, had a profound legacy upon Irish history. For starters, the failure of the rebellion led directly to the Act of Union of 1800 and the end of Irish legislative independence until 1922. In this sense the rebels of 1798 emerged with exactly the opposite of the independent republic they had wanted.

In the longer term, the rebellion had just as important an ideological legacy. One of the strengths of this book is how Quinn manages to summarise briefly but clearly, the process by which the ideas of the 1790s were processed by later generations. From the ideology of the United Irishmen comes the basis for modern Irish republicanism; the demand for an Irish Republic, the willingness to take up arms in its pursuit and the insistence that the sectarian divisions of the past should be irrelevant to Irish citizenship.

Though defeated at the time, as Quinn lays out in his chapter on legacy, The United Irish legacy was revived in print and in rhetoric by the Young Irelanders of the mid nineteenth century and especially popularised by the Fenians and their successors from the 1860s onwards.

This is more consequential than the old shibboleths about ‘keeping the flame of rebellion alive’. The original United Irishmen were essentially Whigs or British liberals who had been radicalised by the era of Revolution in America and in France. They came disproportionately from Ireland’s Protestant elite and espoused a universalist ideology, which included giving full rights of citizenship to the oppressed Catholic majority, universal male suffrage, annually elected parliaments and Irish independence.

This was the most radical end of a wider movement among Ireland’s narrow political class, which from the 1780s, had begun to demand more independence from Britain. They famously coerced the British government into granting the Irish Parliament legislative independence in 1782. However, one episode that was new to me in this book was the ‘regency crisis’ of 1789-90 when the Whigs wanted effectively to depose King George III, who was suffering from a bout of mental illness, in favour of the Prince of Wales who would act as regent. The Irish ‘Patriots’ backed the Whig line, which conservatives deemed perilously close to revolution.

Another aspect of ‘Patriotism’ in Ireland was returning religious and civil rights to Catholics: removing restrictions on religious practice and landholding and returning Catholics the right to vote in 1793. By the mid-1790s, conservatives such as the Protestant ‘junta’ in Parliament of Foster, Fitzgibbon and Beresford insisted that reform go no further and liberals such as Henry Grattan advised caution in further reforms. But a portion of elite society, by contrast, sought radical reform and when this was thwarted, revolution.

Re-reading this familiar story here, one is struck by two things. Firstly, the leading United Irishmen such as Wolfe Tone, or to an even greater extent Lord Edward Fitzgerald, came from within the Anglican apex of Irish society. Without this ‘elite defection’ to use a modern term, the 1798 rebellion could not have happened as it did. It was predictable that Catholics and Presbyterians would, in a period of economic and social change, begin demanding more political rights, and the average United Irish rebel in 1798 likely came from one of these two groups. The leadership and direction of the movement though, was delivered by radicalised members of the Protestant elite.

Secondly, the radicals gravely understimated thier task. They considered that the Age of Reason and enlightened reforms would sweep away old divisions in Ireland as everywhere else. A new rational society, presumably led by them, would be a blank slate. In this they were mistaken.

To achieve popular support, they had to engage with the interests and sentiments of Catholics, about 80 per cent of the population, who nursed long standing grievances against the status quo, believing themselves to be the descendants of the natives of Ireland, unjustly dispossessed in the wars of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. This inevitably mired the United Irish project in the sectarian and social conflicts at the heart of Irish society.

At first the ‘brotherhood of affection’ the United Irishmen envisaged involved adopting the moderate Catholic demand to hold public office. They made a working coalition with middle class Catholics in the Catholic Committee. As the 1790s wore on, however it also involved a merger at ground level with the Defenders, a Catholic secret society founded in south Ulster during a period of violent sectarian strife with the Protestant Peep O’ Day Boys. The latter formed the basis of the Orange Order, founded in 1795, but the Defenders provided many of the footsoldiers for the United Irishmen.

The Defenders, oaths speak about ‘planting the tree of liberty’ which shows that they absorbed some republican rhetoric. But they were also deeply involved in baldly sectarian economic and social conflict, notably with the Protestant Peep O’Day Boys over control of the linen trade in south Ulster and resisting payment of rents and tithes to the mostly Protestant landed class. United Irish ‘outreach’ included the circulation of an ‘Orange Extermination Oath’, a plot to kill all Catholics, urging Catholics to join them for self-defence against their sectarian enemies.

Irish Republicanism has struggled ever since with this contradiction between a universalist, enlightenment ideology and a base deeply rooted in the popular Irish Catholic communal identity and the advance of that community’s interests. The United Irishmen of the 1790s, rooted though they were among northern Presbyterians as well as southern Catholics, were never able to square this circle, nor have Irish republicans since.

Quinn’s book is a narrative history rather than primarily a commentary or analysis. There are other books which can argue this case more thoroughly. Kevin Whelan’s Tree of Liberty rather optimistically claims that the United Irishmen popularised ‘the Republic in the Village’. Jim Smyth’s Men of No Property attempts to explain at more length the links, but also the deep contradictions, that emerged between popular and elite radicalism in 1790s Ireland.

However, in his discussion of the causes and representations of the Rising in the latter half of the book, Quinn takes the reader clearly and concisely through the attempts by historians to explain the rebellion.

Notable amongst them is Louis Cullen’s intriguing argument that the radicalisation of the 1790s represented primarily a schism within the Protestant gentry about how to respond to a changing society and to Catholics’ return to political life from the 1780s onwards. Some, effectively tried to lead the Catholics, whereas others violently reacted against the threat to their status and perhaps their property and lives.

Quinn notes how Daniel O’Connell, the Catholic leader, renounced the legacy of 1798 in the 1800s and accused the United Irish leadership, a mostly Protestant group of political radicals, of leading the Catholic masses into a doomed rebellion, which unleashed upon them the unrestrained violence of state and loyalist forces. Irish nationalists of later eras were most uncomfortable with this line of argument, but perhaps it had a germ of a point. The Catholic Church itself, Quinn shows denounced the rebellion and bet instead on relying on the British government for reform of Irish society.

The rebellion itself takes up the middle chapters of the book. Quinn usefully observes that patterns of the rebellion were heavily localised. Dublin was intended to have been the epicentre of the rising, but the decapitation of the United Irish leadership there by arrest meant that there was no fighting in the city.  The outbreaks in the surrounding counties, intended to draw troops away from an uprising in Dublin, were bloody but short lived.

Eastern Ulster, the heartland of Presbyterian radicalism, rose briefly but even here there were essentially separate rebellions in counties Antrim and Down. Areas with more overt sectarian tensions, in west and southern Ulster failed to stir.

Especially in County Wexford, the rebellion was blighted by accusations of sectarian atrocities against Protestants loyalists, much seized upon by loyalist writers such as Richard Musgrave, to show that beneath the veneer of United Irish Jacobinism, the rebellion was merely a ‘Popish plot’, led by Catholic priests. A replay in effect, of the rebellion of 1641. To which the standard Catholic or liberal Protestant response was that the excesses of the rebels were merely a response to the savage repression meted out to innocent people by the military and the mostly Protestant Yeomanry before, during and after the uprising.

Quinn helpfully debunks the idea that the rebellion was primarily led by priests. Only 70 out of Ireland’s 1,800 Catholic priests were even accused of taking part in the rebellion.

The French intervention, landing a small force in the west, after most of the rebellion had already been quashed, was effectively an afterthought. And Quinn notes that as the French revolutionary Republic morphed into the Napoleonic Empire in the 1800s, it became much less attractive to radical democrats in Ireland.

James Quinn lays out the story of the 1798 rebellion with great clarity and even-handedness in this short book. As the former editor of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography, he is intimately familiar with many of the personalities and events of the 1790s and this shows in a dense, but readable narrative. This book helps to explain how 1790s Ireland escaped from the control of the elites of the eighteenth century and the ensuing ferment ultimately spilled over into the savage violence of the summer of 1798.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to our Patreon page for The Irish Story if you would like to support our work.

Also reviewed here.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to our Patreon page for The Irish Story if you would like to support our work.

Published by Irish Academic Press, Newbridge 2026

ISBN: 9781788551816

Reviewer: John Dorney

The first census of the Irish Free State took place one hundred years ago. It was collected by some 2,000 members of the Garda, the new police force, the data sifted by 83 clerks and collated by way of punch cards attached to each form and counted by machines. It had now been released to the public in digital form for the first time, following previous digital releases of the censes of 1901 and 1911.

This book, a handsome, illustrated volume, edited by Orlaith McBride and John Gibney, is a collection of essays on the census and the Irish society it explored. There are no less than twenty three separate essays, on a wide range of topics, though most are short and quite easy to digest.

A great feature of modern Irish history writing, facilitated by the ongoing digitisation of various sources, has been the concentration of the micro; a particular page in a census, a particular file in the Military Pension collection and so forth. Some of the contributions here follow this model with pieces on individual streets and villages in Galway, Dublin and Clare, a workhouse in Cavan and so on. And while this gives valuable human colour and insight, this reviewer got most from those entries which collated the data and explained the general trends the information in the census showed.

The population of the 26 county Irish state was found to be 2.9 million, a continued fall, of about five per cent, since the last census of 1911. Myram Nyhan Grey records that before the 1926 census the Irish state had established that 1.8 million Irish born people were residing in other countries, principally in the United States, Britain and the Dominions of the British Empire.

It had always been the objective of Irish nationalists to arrest the exodus of people from Ireland, ongoing since the mid nineteenth century. The results of the 1926 census must, then, have come as a disappointment, even so soon after independence in 1922. Nyhan Grey shows that the official reaction to the continued decline in the population revealed by the 1926 census was denial that ongoing emigration was the cause. They preferred citing instead the population losses caused by the First World War, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-19 and the withdrawal of the British military and administrative staff after 1922 (together accounting for well over 100,000 people).

It is notable that deaths in Ireland’s owned armed conflicts from 1916-23 had, by contrast, a negligible effect on the population profile. Research elsewhere has estimated these at no more than 5,000 deaths in total across the island.

Interestingly, the census found slightly more men than women in the Irish Free State; 50 to 49 per cent, a pattern most unusual in Europe. This was likely the result of asymmetric emigration, in which young women left the country in somewhat greater numbers than men.

Marriages took place surprisingly late in life in 1926 and we find that 72 per cent of men and over 50 per cent of women aged 25-35 found in the census were unmarried. This was probably the result of an ongoing pattern of post famine inheritance of farms in rural Ireland, in which the eldest son had to wait until the death of his father before he inherited farm and was seen as eligible to marry.

There are some modern resonances here. Delaying marriage, which today is commonly attributed to the difficulty in buying a home, is nothing new. Additionally in those days many more people than today entered the celibate Catholic orders, removing them from eligibility for marriage. The difference in birth rate between now and then seems to be attributable, as Lindsay Earner Byrne notes here, not so much to earlier marriage as to the fertility of early twentieth century couples once they were married.

Indeed the largest cohort of the Irish population (29 per cent) was aged 14 or under in 1926, compared to just under 40 in the 2022 census. This shows the high birth rate of one hundred years ago, but high emigration plus the effects of war and disease meant that society in the Free State lacked the ‘bulge’ of young adults it should have shown.

Some 70 per cent of the population was rural and over 50 per cent worked in agriculture, as  Gregory Walls shows, in one of the four chapters he contributes. The exception was the city of Dublin, which by 1926 had nearly half a million inhabitants and was still growing. It is worth recalling that this underlined the quite marked contrast between life experience in Dublin and the mostly rural ‘country’ until quite recently.

Partition had lopped off a great swathe of the island’s urban working class into another jurisdiction. Manufacturing employed just 14 per cent of the population south of the border and the number of domestic servants was in decline, driven, in part, by the decline of the Big House and also by the advances in household technology, especially in refrigeration.

Housing was, apparently, recorded as being better in the Irish Free State than Scotland but worse than in Northern Ireland considerably worse than in England or Wales. Ruth McManus shows that overcrowding was endemic in urban areas, especially in Dublin, but also in places like Limerick, Waterford, Sligo and Cork  and was actually getting worse, in 1926, before the large schemes of public housing of the 1930s were started.

The equivalent Northern Ireland census was lost, apparently pulped during the Second World War, so no direct comparison is available between the two states in 1926 Ireland. However, what is clear is that both had a distinct ethno-religious identity and in the case of the southern state at least, demographic changes post 1922 greatly reinforced this.

The Free State in 1926 showed a major drop in its Protestant population, of 32 per cent since 1911, only party explained by the withdrawal of the British Army and civil administration. Andy Bielenberg restates his thesis that lethal violence against Protestants, while it existed in the revolutionary years, was not a major cause for the Protestant exodus, citing instead low birth rates, losses in the First World War and other factors. Though he does surmise that ‘general apprehension among the minority’ about their future in a Catholic and nationalist-dominated state must also have been a factor in some leaving for Northern Ireland or Britain.

Dublin’s Protestant bourgeoisie emerged mostly unscathed from the revolutionary years, indeed they comprised a hugely disproportionate share of business owners and upper professionals in 1926. The Protestant farming population, surprisingly, given their vulnerability to political or agrarian violence during the revolutionary years, actually grew, we learn in Bielenberg’s chapter. Surprisingly also, we learn, the major drop in Protestant population, apart from those employed by the police or military, was in working class urban Protestants. We may speculate on why this was, the loss of ancillary occupations associated with the British Army perhaps? Loss of privileged position in certain trades? We must await further research for answers.

At the other end of the social scale, Terence Dooley highlights the position of the gentry, formerly the ruling class, or ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ but now by 1926 a largely powerless relic. Many had left permanently for Britian. Their estates had shrunk through various land acts, their rental incomes were greatly reduced and some of their great houses had been burned in 1920-23 and had disappeared altogether by the 1926 census.

Indeed one is struck by the homogeneity of the Free State’s population. John Gibney finds himself struck by the presence of foreign-born people across the country. While this may confound some readers’ expectation that the state’s population would be 100% Irish-born and Catholic, in fact the state was about 92% Catholic we learn and up to 97% Irish born. Of those born elsewhere, the vast majority were from Britain, with only a handful born outside the English-speaking world. Only 13,000 people were registered as non-Christian, of whom just under a third were comprised of the state’s small Jewish community.

The contrast with today’s Ireland is striking. In the 2022 census, some 20 per cent of the population was foreign born, in a population of over five million, and both the population and percentage of foreign born residents has increased hugely in the years since then.

Eighteen per cent of people registered in the 1926 census could speak Irish but only 1% filled out their census forms in that language. Cormac Ó Gráda and Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh show that this was partly because of overcounting in Gaeltacht areas, some of which were transitioning to English speaking, but also because many Irish speakers were illiterate. In either case though, it boded ill for the stated aim of the new state which was to revive Irish as the primary language of the country.

This book is an attractive, accessible and nicely illustrated volume that will greatly help to contextualise the 1926 census for who find themselves perusing it. It also contains much of interest for those looking more broadly to understand Irish society of one hundred years ago.

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A royal arrival in a west of Ireland town became a test of the Free State’s authority, exposing the strain between local welcome and national unease. By Emma Ryan.

Princess Mary’s visit to her husband, Viscount Henry Lascelles’s Portumna estate in October 1928, is remembered as one of the more remarkable episodes in the County Galway town’s twentieth-century history.

As the only daughter of British King George V and Queen Mary, her presence carried a significance beyond a private family visit.

The visit unfolded within the unsettled political landscape of the early Irish Free State. It was the first time a member of the British monarchy had visited since Independence in 1922. Though intended as a private stay, nothing involving such high-profile figures could remain private for long. This was to prove problematic.

The visit brought together several unresolved tensions at once: the legacy of landlordism, the authority of the new Free State, and the place of the monarchy in a country that had only recently broken from British rule. In Portumna, it was welcomed with genuine enthusiasm. Nationally, however, it was more sensitive. For the government, it required careful handling in an area still marked by the legacy of landlord-tenant conflict. Even before the couple arrived, the older divisions surfaced again.

Locals were already familiar with Lord Lascelles, who in 1916 had inherited the Clanricarde estate valued at £2.5 million from his great-uncle, Hubert de Burgh-Canning, 2nd Marquess and 15th Earl of Clanricarde. His grandmother, Elizabeth, had been the Earl’s sister. ‘Lucky Lascelles’, they called him. By then, much of the estate had already been broken up through Congested Districts Board acquisition, part of the wider transfer of land from landlords to tenants, though the demesne, the working farm, and some tenanted lands were retained.

The 14th Earl of Clanricarde died in 1874. The 15th Earl, who succeeded him, was an absentee landlord, living in rented rooms in London for almost four decades and the estate bore the mark of that long absence.  When Lord inherited in 1916, his own life was centred at Harewood House in Yorkshire, the principal seat of the Lascelles family. He inherited an estate with a history that still formed part of the atmosphere of the area.

He inherited the weight of that past and that would not easily be erased. Lord Clanricarde was one of the most notorious landlords, whose neglect and punitive actions had brought great distress to the tenantry. The estate had long stood as one of the most contentious landlord holdings in the west of Ireland, and the struggles associated with it helped to galvanise Land League agitation in the region.

The inheritance came to him in April 1916, while he was serving at the front in the First World War, afterward as a Major in the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards. It was also the same month as the Easter Rising, placing the beginning of his relationship with Portumna at a time of global war and upheaval at home.

He first visited in November of that year, his left arm injured. He acknowledged, “during the war, we cannot make any very definite plans for the future”. He spoke as though the war alone stood in the way of his plans. There is little sign that he grasped how much Ireland had changed, or how contested the old landlord assumptions had become.

Commentary shows that the tensions surrounding the 1928 visit had been building for years. As early as 1924, British observers reacted cautiously to the idea that Princess Mary might establish a summer home at Portumna, noting that the associations of the place were “not altogether agreeable”.

Yet there was a counter-hope according to the British press, that a popular princess might bring “blessings in a region where only curses used to prevail.”  The legacy of Hubert de Burgh-Canning, a byword for absentee landlordism and a bleak past, was widely understood. To place a member of the royal family in that landscape was to place royalty into a history not yet settled.

The 1924 discussion suggests that she came to see the castle in the context of its possible future as an Irish home. That idea had been part of Lascelles’s ambitions from the moment he inherited the estate. Portumna Castle had stood as a ruin since a devastating fire in 1826. Built in the early seventeenth century, it was one of the earliest Renaissance style houses in Ireland.

In 1917, Lord Lascelles had plans drawn up to rebuild the Castle as a part-time residence. During the visit, press reports suggested that it might one day serve as a residence for his son George. Had the plans gone ahead, a grandson of King George V would have occupied the castle. In that sense, the Crown that had once underpinned Clanricarde power might briefly have come full circle. Press coverage seized on this possibility.

However, after the war in 1919, the estimated rebuilding costs had risen by about 125 per cent on the pre-war estimates. His architect, John Bilson, advised that restoring the castle for anything like £30,000 original estimates was no longer possible.

His life also changed dramatically when in 1922 he married Princess Mary and established a London base at Chesterfield House, while later, after succeeding to the title, substantial resources were directed towards the renovation of Harewood House to suit their life as Earl and Countess.

What appeared possible in 1917 belonged to another time. By 1928, the question was no longer whether Portumna Castle could be rebuilt, but whether such a project still made sense. If the future of the castle remained uncertain, his arrival in Portumna was anything but.

When Lord Lascelles first came to Portumna in 1916, an elaborate reception was organised. The town was illuminated, bonfires lit the streets, and a torchlight procession, accompanied by a brass and reed band playing Come Back to Erin, a song of return and belonging, escorted him from the bridge. At the entrance to the demesne, a banner was raised bearing the inscription: “De Burgo, 1215; Lascelles, 1916.”

He was presented with a formal illuminated address couched in a language of deference, invoking ancestry and loyalty. It invited him to take his place among them as “our leader, partner and friend”, and declared that “a new era has dawned for all of us”. He responded in kind, speaking of his wish to return, to spend time “amongst them,” and to spend at least part of the year at Portumna. The organisers hoped for practical results and later argued that it had done so: rent reductions, relief of arrears, employment, fuel for the poor, and pensions. These gave substance to the optimism that surrounded the reception.

His arrival was treated as a civic occasion in a county known for sharp political and religious divisions. Reports noted that, despite this, people of different denominations joined in receiving him. It was a deliberate act of civic unity in a highly charged political climate.

Not everyone saw it that way. In a country still marked by political strain, there was discomfort at the scale of the welcome and at what it seemed to represent. Critics described the “previous regime” in terms of “plunderers and oppressors” and referred to “schemes of wholesale extermination,” expressing shock that Catholic clergy and nationalist representatives would take part in such an occasion, so soon after independence.

Yet that reaction only underlines the significance of what happened in Portumna. James Cosgrave MP, who had often clashed with the late Lord Clanricarde, publicly supported the reception and later made clear that events had justified that course as they had succeeded in what they set out to do, secure rent reductions and pensions for estate workers. For him, and for others locally, it was a case of tenant welfare taking precedence over political .

This was not the first twentieth-century fire on the estate. On June 18^th, 1921, during the War of Independence, the so-called ‘new’ Castle, built in 1867, was destroyed, amid the wider pattern of country house burnings. At the Galway Quarter Session,  Lord Lascelles claimed of £200,000 in compensation, but the court was ruled the fire accidental as malice could not be proved.

So, when, in the early hours of October 1928, petrol was poured through a window at the Dowager House, a residence within the estate grounds, and the attached stable yard was set on fire, it belonged to a longer history.

“Please try and stop Princess Mary coming to I.F.S. Too dangerous.”

Prior to Princess Mary’s journey to Ireland, a telegram carrying the above stark warning was sent from an unknown man in Kingstown to King George V, triggering a chain of official communications that passed through the highest levels of the Irish Free State and the British government.

King George V, the Dominions Office, Free State premier W. T. Cosgrave, senior civil servants, and the upper ranks of the Garda Síochána were all drawn into the question of Princess Mary’s safety.

It exposed the Irish Free State to a direct test of its capacity to maintain order under exceptional political and diplomatic pressure. At stake was the safety of the monarch’s daughter, and was therefore a matter not only of hospitality, but of diplomacy.

A commentary in republican newspaper An Phoblacht reminded readers that Portumna Castle had come to Lord Lascelles through the Clanricarde inheritance, remarking: “The Western peasantry have memories of the Clanricarde – they should need no reminders on that score.”

Yet the house where Princess Mary was to stay remained unsecured, even though her household had already been in residence for nearly two weeks. That exposure became brutally clear on the night of October 4^th, two days before the couple arrived, when the stable and coach house buildings were burnt and the centre of gravity shifted in an instant, from household preparations to state security. Despite the warning telegram and the arson attack, the visit went ahead.

The attack centred on the stable yard near the North Gate. Petrol had been poured through a kitchen window but failed to ignite inside because the flagged stone floor prevented the fire from taking hold. The adjoining coach houses and stables were burned to the ground. By the time Princess Mary arrived, the arson had already made concern for her safety acute. Security arrangements appear to have intensified rapidly after the fire.

Detectives from the Garda Criminal Investigation Department (CID) arrived, and senior intelligence officer David Neligan became . Neligan had served during the War of Independence as an IRA intelligence agent within Dublin Castle, secretly passing intelligence to Michael Collins.

During the Civil War he worked in Free State military intelligence, which he ultaimtely commanded, and in the post 1923 period headed the Garda detective branch. His involvement shows that the matter had reached the highest level of state security.

In hindsight, the estate should have been secured as soon as the Princess’s household staff arrived. Instead, the response gathered urgency only after the danger had already declared itself.

Three men were later charged, but the case was withdrawn for lack of evidence. The act was widely interpreted as politically motivated, understood as a strike against the presence of royalty in the new state and, for some, against the landlord system they represented.

In an interview, Lord Lascelles made it known that he and Princess Mary deeply regretted if their visit had caused suffering. They expressed hope that ‘no vindictive action’ would follow. His response suggested a wish to restore calm, perhaps shaped by concern for his shy royal bride and by the knowledge that the outside world, including his father-in-law, was watching.

Whatever calm he displayed at the time, his later claim against Galway and North Tipperary County Councils for £1,000 following the destruction of the stables suggests a less forgiving later response. The sum itself was minuscule when measured against the scale of his inherited wealth, which makes the claim all the more telling. While in Portumna, he presented himself as a benevolent and public-spirited landlord, willing to support local causes and anxious to steady the atmosphere after the fire.

Lord Lascelles had a habit of trying to recover losses from the locality.  After the ‘new’ Castle burned in 1921, he unsuccessfully pursued a claim of £200,000 through the courts. Yet once back at a remove, the older instinct reasserted itself in the £1,000 claim, where the damage was again treated as something that might be answered for by the locality.

In Portumna, the response to the fire was swift and empathic. The attack was condemned by community leaders and by both church leaders, described as a “stain on the honour of the parish”. Yet the visit went ahead with heightened security and a change of travel plans from train to motorcar.

Arrival and First Impressions

The steamer Lady Limerick came into the North Wall at 9 a.m. on Saturday, October 6^th, to a crowd of about 500, with some reported to be waving Union Jacks. Before travelling west, the couple breakfasted in the city and called at the former Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park.

She had been to the Phoenix Park in 1911 as a fourteen-year-old with her father; nothing then could have hinted at the path that would later bring her back to Ireland, and onward to Portumna Castle.

That afternoon, an Armstrong Siddeley car swept through the gates of Portumna Castle. Nearly three hundred people lined the avenue, cheering as the Princess “inclined her head in thanks” and Lord Lascelles “raised his trilby in salute”. The excited community met them with the fire still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Contemporary reports observed that Princess Mary would have been the first member of the Royal family in any reign to possess a home in Ireland. Coverage differed sharply on either side of the Irish Sea. British newspapers leaned into the romance of the occasion. Irish coverage was more cautious and layered, and the idea of a British princess taking even seasonal residence there was difficult to accept in some quarters. While local reports reflected warmth, national commentary carried a sharper edge, returning to the legacy of Clanricarde and the tensions that still lingered beneath the surface.

As if time had been suspended, on Sunday, accompanied by detectives and her lady-in-waiting, the Hon. Miss Kenyon-Slaney, Princess Mary and Lord Lascelles followed the path of his ancestors and entered the Church of Ireland via the private Yew Walk, taking their seats in the Clanricarde gallery unused since 1874. In an extraordinary moment, the congregation rose to sing “God Save the King”.

The press enjoyed reporting on the smaller details that showed a human touch. Caught in a sudden shower, the couple took shelter in the cottage of an estate worker, where Princess Mary stood by the turf fire and shook hands with his son. It was a small, unguarded moment quickly reported and widely repeated.

Lord Lascelles spoke of plans for the estate and its future, including developing a stud farm. This is the kind of development that local people hoped for in an economy marked by high unemployment and emigration.  In quieter moments, the couple visited local schools, where children sang in Irish, part of a new cultural language taking shape in the Free State.

Princess Mary had clearly won local people over, described as shy beside her tall, self-assured husband, together they came across as easy, personable, and genuinely at home in Portumna.

The Princess and the Post Box.

On Monday, the couple walked through Portumna, and thousands had flocked to the town. A remarkable photo survives: Princess Mary walking down the main street, the men lifting their hats in greeting, a gesture of respect that now feels almost from another world, and which captures something of the inherent contradictions at the heart of that week.

At the post office, these contradictions came into sharper focus. She passed a post box still bearing the ‘GR’ cipher of her father’s reign, painted over in green.

After independence, Ireland began to rebrand itself, trying to reclaim a national identity. Part of that rebranding used the colour green to portray an ideal of purity and simplicity rooted in rural Ireland. The Emerald Isle. Out of economy and practicality, the post boxes were not replaced; instead, they had been repainted, the old royal insignia covered but not erased. Yet here was the King’s daughter, walking through a newly independent state, passing her own father’s cipher to a rapturous welcome.

Was it ironic? Certainly.

Did she notice? Almost certainly.

Eventually the week of welcomes and headlines was over, Princess Mary and Viscount Lascelles left Portumna. For several days, the town had been swept into a rare excitement, the culmination of months, if not years, of preparation, and of optimism that had gathered around the castle and its future.

Before leaving, Lord Lascelles spoke of the pleasure their stay had given him and his wife, and his hope to return in the near future.  As the couple left on such happy terms, there were expectations of return, of renewal, and of what that connection might yet bring.

Security remained tight on their departure. Colonel David Neligan, Chief of the Free State Detective Force, together with officers of the CID. They travelled to Cloughjordan railway station, where they boarded the train north, continuing via Dublin to Belfast, where Princess Mary and Viscount Lascelles resumed official royal duties on behalf of the Crown. The same couple, on the same day, on the same island, moved through two jurisdictions.

They remained in Belfast until Saturday, 13 October, when, following the Lord Mayor’s Reception at Belfast City Hall and other official engagements, they departed for London, bringing the Irish trip to its close.

Conclusion – The Consequences for Portumna

When Lord Lascelles mentioned the possibility of returning the following summer, later correspondence shows that this intention was genuine. On 10 August 1929, Lascelles wrote to Lord Granard, Senator Bernard Forbes, regarding the practical arrangements required for a return to Portumna.

As he put it: “I must send over a decent housekeeper and housemaid for Princess Mary, and the moment they go over, the bad news is broadcast all over the place.” Granard referred the matter to the office of W. T. Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council. In a reply dated 14 August, Cosgrave acknowledged that preparations would “alert rumours in the locality.”

His frustration was evident. Without privacy, security could not be guaranteed, and the IFS were clearly not going to bear the cost of sustained protection.

That frustration was understandable, but an Irish holiday home at that juncture was a case of wrong time, wrong place.

In 1929, on the death of his father, Lord Lascelles became the 6^th Earl of Harewood. They moved into Harewood House in 1930 and their position in England changed and with it any real likelihood of Portumna becoming a regular centre of their lives.

Alongside this, by the late 1930s, government policy under de Valera favoured agricultural production and self-sufficiency, and large estates were expected either to adapt or to retreat. Lascelles did both. In 1938, he entered a ten-year scheme that shifted the estate towards tillage, aligned with the wheat drive, forgave arrears, and reduced his financial exposure. The earlier ambition to rebuild the castle gave way to a more practical settlement. The estate was no longer being prepared for residence but reorganised for exit. As one later press report put it, he was effectively being encouraged to “cut Ireland,” and he did so.

After his death in 1947, the final stages of transfer followed quickly. Within a year, tenants were enabled to purchase their holdings, while the demesne and woodland passed into state hands through the Forestry Commission. This marked a shift from a town existing to support a castle to a castle belonging to the town.

Local effort, together with the OPW from the 1960s onwards, restored Portumna Castle, as private ownership gave way to public stewardship. It is now recognised as one of the most important surviving Renaissance castles in Ireland.

In the end, the bulk of the inheritance that passed from Lord Clanricarde to Lord Lascelles flowed onward to his son George. The estate’s story folded back towards royalty, its wealth absorbed into the Harewood estate, as if the inheritance had found its way back to where it began. The Clanricardes secured their lands in 1543 by aligning with the crown under surrender and regrant, a decision that allowed them to endure for four centuries. When the line ended and Hubert decided to leave the fortune to Lascelles, what had been preserved for generations passed back to the royal family.

The weight of the visit lies in its many layers. The IFS was being tested, managing an occasion that carried political and diplomatic meaning. At the same time, there was unease, seen in the arson and the memory of landlord conflict that had never fully disappeared. Alongside that stood a small town that had waited a long time for something to change, for investment, for the chance that the Castle might rise again. And within it all, there was Lord Lascelles himself, returning to an estate he had inherited unexpectedly, wanting to show it to his wife. He inherited during a global war, returned with plans, and encountered a country that was itself being remade.

All of these strands came together in one place. For a few days, Portumna held them .

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Sources

1. Midland Counties Advertiser, December 21, 1916.

2. Leinster Reporter, November 5, 1921.

3. The Irish Times, November 5, 1921.

4. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, March 10, 1923.

5. Western Mail, October 27, 1924.

6. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, October 5, 1928.

7. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, October 8, 1928.

8. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, October 8, 1928.

9. Sheffield Independent, October 10, 1928.

10. Belfast News-Letter, December 6, 1937.

11. Western Morning News, April 21, 1938.

12. Yorkshire Evening Post, June 20, 1938.

13. Department of the Taoiseach files, “Women in 20th-century Ireland, 1922–1966: sources,” finding aid database, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin.
14. I  am grateful to Stephen Nevin for sharing his notes and for the insight and perspective he brought to this research.