A Future for Irish Historic Houses - Irish Heritage Trust

a distance from their houses. In 1903, the Wyndham Land Act promoted the sale of
landed estates on a revolutionary scale because of its generous terms to landlords (it
offered them a 12 per cent cash bonus on the sale of their estates) and to tenants (it
guaranteed them that annuities repayable on loans advanced to purchase their
holdings would be less that their previous rents.) Landlords received colossal sums of
money, particularly those who owned extensive estates. The King Harmans, for
example, whose ancestors originally owned King House in Boyle before moving to
Rockingham, sold around 70,000 acres for over £625,000 or roughly £31.25 million
in today’s terms.
After debts and estate charges had been paid, many of the larger landlords were left
with significant capital sums to invest. Most also retained their demesnes and other
tracts of untenanted lands for farming purposes. Had not other factors intervened, they
might very well have continued to live rather opulent lifestyles.
These factors included World War I which had at least a psychological effect on the
(former) landed class; the revolutionary period which followed in Ireland from 1917
to 1923 that resulted in the malicious burning of around 300 country houses and the
abandonment of many more; the post-war worldwide economic depression that
decimated the investment portfolio of most country house owners and which
culminated in the Wall Street Crash of 1929; and the introduction of Free State land
legislation from 1923, the primary aim of which was the compulsory acquisition of
the remaining lands of country house owners.
To compound all of this, the simultaneous and rather dramatic increase in the level of
rates from the 1920s, exacting taxation, particularly in the form of succession duties,
and the Wealth Tax of 1974 all combined to drive owners to sell their houses,
abandon them or strip them of their remaining contents.
For decades after independence, government policy did nothing to alleviate the plight
of the owners of historic houses or to acknowledge the cultural heritage significance
of their homes. For example, houses taken over by the Irish Land Commission were
demolished or simply left to fall into ruins. More lamentable still was that houses
gifted to the state, such as Muckross, were left for decades to fall into disrepair before
their worth was recognised. When houses such as Castletown, regarded as being of
great international importance, faced imminent demolition, no official concern was
expressed. It was left to the efforts of individuals and the Irish Georgian Society to
save it.
The prevailing conventional wisdom in the Irish state of the twentieth century was,
therefore, unkind to historic houses. The destruction, abandonment and sale of
hundreds of them continued for the most part unabated. From the 1920s to at least the
1980s, historic houses tended to be bought by organisations, institutions, the state or
local authorities that all had damaging utilitarian plans for their adaptation and usage.
Many houses became hospitals, factories, schools, prisons and so on, with obvious
consequences for their original integrity. There is probably no more than about fifty of
the great houses remaining in the ownership of their original families. Most of these
have had at least some of their valuable contents dispersed throughout the world,
while the vast majority of those that have been purchased by the state, institutions,
organisations and individuals have scarcely any of their original contents in situ.
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