Big House Burnings in County Tipperary during the Irish Civil War

Abstract

Big House Burnings in County Tipperary during the Irish Civil War* James S. Donnelly Jr. (bio) County Tipperary is of particular interest in any examination of what has been termed the "last land war" in the midst of the Civil War of 1922–23.1 More Big Houses (twenty-nine mansions) of the fading Irish landed gentry and aristocracy were burned in this county than in any other in all of Ireland between January 1922 and April 1923. What remains to be discovered is the combination of motivations that prompted incendiarism on such a widespread scale in this particular county.2 Quite recently, Terence Dooley has drawn attention to the much greater role played by land hunger and agrarianism during the Civil War of 1922–23 in southern Ireland, though he is careful to identify and discuss the other motives that were also sources behind such a dramatic and terrorizing phenomenon.3 Tipperary not only provides abundant evidence for his argument but also demonstrates the range of other significant motives that were frequently in play. Among the reasons for this extremely widespread destruction of mansions were certain military and political factors that should also be carefully investigated. The very first Tipperary mansion to be burned during the Civil War was Castle Fogarty, belonging to Major-General Valentine Ryan [End Page 224] and located at Ballycahill near Thurles on 19 April 1922.4 In the absence of the owner, members of the British Army and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) had previously occupied the castle for an extended period ending in February 1922, when it was reportedly "taken over by members" of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) "in a dilapidated condition."5 Whether these occupiers from opposing sides contributed in some way to the castle's destruction is uncertain, though the armed presence of British soldiers and the RIC may have prompted the agrarian militants to delay taking action.6 What is clear is that agrarian motives played the largest role in the destruction of this Tipperary mansion. Providing evidence of the agrarian motives at issue were a combination of violent events extending over many months in 1922 and 1923. Beginning in March 1922 Ryan was subjected to what became "continuous outrage" when cattle were driven off his demesne and "after much difficulty and searching by motor car, etc., were finally discovered 25 miles away." Then incendiaries set fire to his mansion (as noted earlier) on 19 April; they also burned his hay barn, hay, and harness room and its contents on 27–28 April; raiders destroyed his avenue gates and ornamental timber on 6 and 7 June; and just ten days later they burned down the house of his steward James Cusack.7 [End Page 225] Not yet done, incendiaries set fire to 55 tons of Ryan's hay early in December 1923.8 The infliction of multiple injuries also attended the destruction of the mansion of Charles C. C. Webb, the owner of Kilmore House near Nenagh in north Tipperary, and the storied residence of Robert Massy Dawson Sanders known as Balinacourte in the Glen of Aherlow. On the night of 29–30 May 1922 Webb and his family as well as his servants "were not long in bed when a number of shots were fired into the ground floor windows, which were further demolished by large stones. A number of men then gained entrance, and saturating the floors and inflammable furniture with petrol, set the place on fire, and in the course of a few hours the whole structure and its contents with the exception of one room were completely demolished in the conflagration." Fortunately, Webb and all the other occupants "escaped from the house without injury, but beyond what they stood up in, nothing was saved from the fire."9 As depressing as the destruction of his mansion was for Webb, this great loss was only the beginning of his troubles, as he himself recounted in his correspondence with the Irish Grants Committee.10 "In 1922 a conspiracy was formed," Webb insisted, "to drive claimant out of Ireland," and this campaign was accompanied by a series of outrages in addition to the burning of Kilmore...