Burning the Big House

Terence Dooley (Yale University Press, £25)

THE country house seems so natural a part of England’s history and landscape that we struggle to imagine it as something threatening, alien or contested. Yet, in Ireland, these buildings—so closely interconnected as they are with their English cousins in family, history and architecture—have very different associations and resonances. Between 1920 and

1923 nearly 300 out of about 1,500 were deliberately burnt down in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War.

This book is a fascinating, insightful and scholarly study of this episode. What emerges from it is a much more complex, nuanced story than that which has been conventionally accepted. This was not an episode in sectarian conflict, nor exclusively part of a nationalist struggle for Irish independence. If there was a fundamental explanation for the destruction, it was rooted in property ownership and the demands for land redistribution.

As context, the book narrates the decline in the economic fortunes of Anglo-irish families from the late 19th century as well as the crisis brought about both by the First World War and the Irish struggle for independence (not to mention the actions of the British government). In combination, these events left Anglo-irish families impoverished, isolated and vulnerable. Their houses bore the consequences.

For all the undoubted suffering brought about by this episode, Ireland’s rural experience was— in comparison to the experience of revolution in other European countries such as Russia— remarkably bloodless. So, too, the subsequent reimposition of order on the political chaos that engulfed rural Ireland as a result of the destruction.

The author has made brilliant and extensive use of primary sources. It becomes clear that there was a distinct local context and story behind the destruction of every house. He doesn’t take sides or lapse into nostalgia for what was lost, although the blackand-white illustrations within the text offer a tantalising glimpse of these vanished buildings. John Goodall