Houses too big to fail
There’s a bit in the new series of The Great House Revival where Mary-Claire Waters and Shane ‘Sully’ O Sullivan learn the house they have bought in the middle of Churchtown, north Cork – known locally as The Parson’s House – and plan on restoring, dates from 1835 and was built as part of the 19th century renewal of Churchtown.
The revival came about after buildings in the centre – mostly thatched cottages – were burned when the Whiteboys threw lighted sods on to the roof of the nearby police barracks in 1822. The barracks went up in flames and the police surrendered, but many surrounding homes burned too.
A Pyrrhic victory. The authorities then decided it was too good a chance to miss. They set about clearing the rest of the town centre, offering the poorest inhabitants £2 to tumble their cottages. That became the start of a more prosperous period for the town, during which The Parson’s House was built, with tooled limestone under a slate roof.
Mary-Claire and Sully knew nothing of the house’s history. They just fell in love with it, despite the fact it was so dilapidated when they viewed it they deliberately didn’t get an engineer to survey it for them. “An engineer might only have added bad news,” Mary-Claire says wryly when we speak.
Undoubtedly an engineer would have. Architect Hugh Wallace, who presents the new RTÉ show, does a good job of delivering his own ‘bad news’ through raised eyebrows and incredulous intonations.
The place really is in a state: damp, rot, peeling wallpaper, sagging plasterwork, disintegrating staircase. This isn’t so much a fixer-upper as a start-from-scratcher.
Luckily Mary-Claire has the kind of energy that powers grids, and Sully has determination, carpentry skills, and an abiding belief in his wife’s wisdom.
Between them, they pull off a miracle. Under budget. It’s a pleasure to watch. But what really struck me was the historical aspect. The reminder that there is scarcely a corner of this country that doesn’t have some deep connection to our centuries of oppression and rebellion. And that this is a story told in stone and slate as much as in ambushes and uprisings.
We all know there is something about the idea of ‘home’ in Ireland that is intangible and powerful, with meaning far greater than four walls and a roof. It goes all the way back to the traumatic insecurity of a humble rented cottage, and takes in our complicated attitudes towards many buildings that belong to our tricky past.
Some were originally British-built, such as barracks and police stations – instruments of colonial oppression – or institutions where the lack of care for Irish people was written in the numbers dying of typhoid and malnutrition. Others were private – homes and estates belonging to the administrators of a colonial system.
These were the Big Houses of the AngloIrish, conspicuous by their size and grandeur in a land of small, often humble, dwellings. They became symbols of oppression and inequality, and the focus of resentment. Many – almost 300 – were burned during the War of Independence, and many others were left to fall apart when the families that owned them either left, or ran out of money for their upkeep.
At the start of the 19th century, there were around 4,000 large country estates. Today there are less than a hundred. Plenty of redrawing of the landscape occurred thanks to the Land Acts of 1903 and 1909 which allowed tenant farmers to buy out their landlords with long-term loans from the British government, so by the 1920s, the Big Houses weren’t always part of big estates. But their symbolic value persisted.
And they continued to mean something, even as the houses – many of them – crumbled and became shells, with collapsed roofs and hollowed-out interiors. For some part of the population, there was a grim satisfaction in watching the progressive decay of something hated.
The idea that we would have bought these houses and restored them at great expense of time, effort and money was, for a long time, ridiculous. No one wanted them. We wanted new-builds, often bungalows. Houses of manageable size and neat proportions, with central heating and modern electrical wiring. There was no charm in old plasterwork and high echofilled ceilings in wood that had been handcarved a century ago.
“We didn’t want any of that,” Hugh Wallace says. “We hated it. It was part of our colonial past. ‘Good enough for them to be left to rot and fall down’ was the attitude. The houses were symbols of a past we hated, and seeing them tumble down may have felt like a kind of victory.”
Things are changing – the fact The Great House Revival is into its fourth series, is proof of that – but we are still, he reckons, in that place of suspicion, “especially if it’s an area where people were treated really badly by the landlords”.
“You can feel that, in certain parts of the country, still. Those living in the community now may not even know the particular history of a house, but you can still get a sense of the way they feel about it.”
It’s a sense passed down through generations, often without specifics, just an instinctive mistrust. He cites the example of Rathdaire House, in Ballybrittas, Co Laois, built by ‘Black Jack’ Adair. “He was a horrible landlord,” Wallace says. “His wife was American and they had loads of money.”
They built the house – two-storey over basement Italianate mansion – in 1835. Black Jack died in 1885.
“He was to be buried in the local graveyard, but the night before the burial, when the grave had been dug, it was desecrated. He was so hated that dead cats and dogs were thrown into the grave. It couldn’t be used,” Wallace says.
“The wife then built this Celtic Revival church in his memory – a Protestant church, built in a very Catholic style called the Church of the Ascension – which is hilarious, for a Protestant church. It is spectacular. The inside is all Italian marble, the workmen were brought over from Italy.”
After decades of being left to rot, often deliberately, there is renewed enthusiasm for rescuing the Big Houses of our troubled past, finds
Two years after Black Jack died, and just over 50 years after it was built, the house burned down. Possibly accidentally. Possibly not. Certainly “there was no regret among the locals,” Wallace says.
“No effort was made to save it. The feeling was ‘let the bloody thing rot’. One man took four of the candy columns from the
Just don’t get him started on what some people choose to do... “The problem with being too on-trend is that you become offtrend,” he says.
So, yes, we are beginning to regenerate our built countryside, “but not nearly quickly enough,” Wallace says. “Some places are getting it right – Clonakilty, for example, was a bit of a kip 25 years ago. Now, it’s a bustling, vibrant market town. They got it right.
“Then you go on to Mallow, and it’s sad. There are such huge opportunities, but the will is lacking. We’ve moved on so much, but we need one final big step, to grab our towns and villages.”
And it’s not just private homes and estates that are foundering. There are, he says, “amazing buildings owned by the State in appalling condition adding to the dereliction in so many towns”.
“No one takes responsibility for them. These can be garda stations, old railway stations, buildings now used by the HSE – organisations are being lumbered with these buildings that aren’t fit for purpose, but they don’t have the budget to do them up. And that isn’t their area of expertise.
“These buildings are part of our heritage, and they are being left to rot. Organisations like the HSE are being asked to provide maintenance services, without the budget or remit to do that. Where does the buck stop? It needs to be somewhere where someone will take responsibility.”
There needs to be honesty too, he says, about what can be saved and what can’t.
“We can’t save every building. A priority list is needed, and the bottom 20pc will have to be let go. There is a point at which a building just isn’t financially viable anymore, where the damage done by a badly damaged roof, for example, is too great.”
‘The Great House Revival’ starts tonight at 9.30pm on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player