Patrick Walsh writes: 1923 was a significant year in the life of Thomas Horgan of Ballynaskreena, Co Kerry. His youngest surviving daughter, Bridget (known as Bridie), was born, and he became the first of his family to own his farm as the title of the land his ancestors had farmed for many generations was transferred to him from Trinity College Dublin as part of the land act initiated by the new Free State government.
This was the latest in a series of land acts which had revolutionised Irish landownership over the previous forty years. Irish peasants like Horgan went from being tenant farmers to becoming proprietors as colonial patterns of landownership were swept away thanks to a combination of local resistance and centralised legislation.
The Horgans of Ballynaskreena had to wait longer than some of their neighbours in north Kerry for this new dawn. In the neighbouring townland of Clashmealcon the infant Bridie’s future father-in-law Jimmy Walsh had already purchased his own twenty-two-acre farm from the local landlord Wilson Gun of Rattoo. The Horgans too paid their rent to Gun but in their case, Gun was but a link in a chain that extended all the way up to their ultimate landlord, the Provost and Fellows of Trinity College Dublin. They, like thousands of other Irish families, were Trinity tenants, living legacies of the colonial land grants that had enriched the university in the faraway capital since the 1590s.
Thomas Horgan was my great-grandfather. His daughter Bridie, whom we knew as nanny, was my grandmother and a font of local knowledge. Sitting with her in the back seat of my father’s car on the road to the beach at Ballyheigue was an education in the lives, deaths, fortunes and misfortunes of the people of the local area. She knew who had married who, who had emigrated, who had died, married and been baptised in every house we passed on the road. She, unlike most of her siblings, who ended up as migrants either in England or, more unusually, running a settler-colonial construction company in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), rarely travelled beyond the bounds of north Kerry, but she knew this part of her world intimately. It was her heritage or dúchas – that magnificent Irish word conveying a meaning that goes beyond sense of place – and she and her family had belonged here for generations.
In a strange twist of fate, the Horgans had in a small way funded the historic privilege and power of my employer, remnants of which still exist in a much altered way today. I am an associate professor of history and fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where together with my colleagues Dr Ciaran O’Neill and Dr Mobeen Hussain I am writing a book on the university’s colonial legacies.
The last surviving member of the Horgan family remembers that the townland was known locally as the college land, but they did not know what or who the college was. They knew they paid a higher rent than their neighbours in the parish. Their ancestor’s labour in the fields, bogs and woods of places like Ballynaskreena had enabled the building of the magnificent university buildings in Dublin, while they were excluded by religion and class from the benefits of the education provided there. Their lives, when considered at all by the university, were done so in an abstract way which negated the personal to focus on the potential of their labour to make the land more ‘improvable’ and therefore profitable. They were absent yet essential and the college had gone to considerable lengths to preserve their huge estates – they contained in total 190,000 acres or 1.2% of Ireland’s surface area – for as long as possible from successive government land acts.
On campus here in Dublin, every evening during term time, if I wish I can enjoy a free dinner in the imposing College Dining Hall. Known, with that irony beloved of ancient institutions, as ‘Commons’, this meal provided for fellows and scholars of the university is a privilege granted to the few. It is also a deeply ritualised affair. Before dinner, surrounded by imposing portraits of past college luminaries and benefactors, including bishops and royal princes, the fellows and scholars listen to a student rattle off in Latin a formal grace composed by Provost William Bedell in 1626.
This ‘grace after meat’ amongst other things thanks the college’s royal benefactors, Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. Daily diners still thank them for the enormous estates granted to Trinity, as part of the colonial plantations of Munster and Ulster between the 1590s and the 1610s, even though the college stopped benefiting from their income a century ago.
The money and land may be gone, but the ritual survives. So too do the legacies of colonialism embedded in the Irish landscape. They are present in place names like the Co. Armagh townlands of Fellows Hall (otherwise Crearum or Áth an Mhuilinn) and College Hall (formerly Machaire Aisiaidh or Marrassit) while the Co Kerry village of Moyvane was known for over a century as Newtown Sandes in honour of the college’s local agents – the descendants of the seventeenth century colonial settler Colonel Lancelot Sandes. The village residents voted to remove that name and revert to the anglicised version of its ancient Irish name, Maigh Mheáin. These place names literally record the rewriting of the landscape in the coloniser’s language. Less immediately visible are the more subtle shifts in the landscape made by the processes of legal imperialism and agrarian capitalism. Property was privatised, ties of kinship were replaced with legal contracts and land was recategorised as profitable and unprofitable. Labouring families were moved from the richer soils suitable for cattle rearing to boggier and rougher ground on the margins – places like Ballynaskreena.
The college surveyors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have left descriptions of Ballynaskreena townland which emphasise the mixed quality of the land and by implication of the inhabitants. Robert Gibson in 1745 describes it in the following terms: ‘the north part good pasture, the south part heathy mountain well provided with turf and water’ while Richard Frizzell thirty years later saw more potential, writing in 1775 how the land was ‘very improvable mountain land’ which was but one mile from the sea from which sand and seaweed could be sourced to improve the soil (my grandmother still knew in the twentieth century where the best seaweed was to be sourced from a blowhole adjacent to the sea off the coast of the neighbouring townland of Beencuneen, reminding us of the inherited knowledge essential to rural life). By 1843, when the college surveyor Maurice Collis visited North Kerry, there were 228 people living on the college estate in the townland – most of whom were living in mud cabins. The area was very badly hit by the Great Famine, with Ballynaskcreena losing 60 per cent of its population between 1841 and 1851. These were traumatic times, and the great hunger remained just about in living memory when my grandparents were born in 1917 and 1923 respectively.
Trinity’s enormous estates were significantly affected by the Famine. In 1843 they were home to a remarkable 71,000 people, of whom the great majority lived in counties Armagh, Donegal and Kerry. In Co Kerry alone the population living in townlands owned by Trinity fell by 5,879 people to just over 18,000 people, a decrease of 23 per cent in the decade 1841-51. The university’s response to distress was desultory. It was much criticised at the time, with their expenditure on relief paling in contrast to the revenues they collected from their estates during the Famine period – they donated £2,000 to relief measures, or just under 10 per cent of their annual rental income. Much of this rental revenue was instead invested in building projects on their Dublin campus with the magnificent Museum Building begun in 1852 at the end of the Famine the stand-out example. Its exquisite architectural detailing and use of the best available Irish stone – it served as a showcase of the richness of Ireland’s geological resources – was in sharp contrast to the ruined and abandoned dwellings of the college’s tenants in the west of Ireland. The houses of the departed, whether dead or emigrated, became spectral presences in the landscape, joining the ruined tower houses that contained the last vestiges of the pre-plantation society that had been replaced by the aggressive colonial policies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This was the landscape within which my grandparents came of age. In Clashmealcon the ruins of the ancient Browne’s Castle overlooked the mouth of the Shannon estuary, a reminder of the outward-looking Anglo-Norman presence that once ruled this part of the Desmond lordship. In 1923 its rocky remains would stand watch over one of the most brutal tragedies of the savage civil war fought in Kerry, the killing of Timothy ‘Aero’ Lyons and his anti-Treaty comrades in Clashmealcon caves. This horrific incident at the very end of the civil war left scars within the community that took a long time to heal if they ever really did. The civil war itself brought an end to decades of violent tension in the area, beginning during the land war of the 1880s, which continued through the revolutionary decade to the passage of the 1923 Land Act. The Trinity estates were caught up in this conflict and the inflexibility of the college board and senior fellows, their unwillingness to reduce their rent during the War of Independence when the tide was clearly turning, exacerbated tensions on their Kerry estates. Trinity still expected prompt payment as they fought their own battle for relevance in the changing revolutionary politics of Dublin. Their head tenants – men like Wilson Gun of Rattoo – were however unable to pay the college as their own tenants in turn began to anticipate the redistribution of the college’s estates by refusing to pay their rent. The chain of interdependent links grounded in a shared financial interest in the land that once extended from the provost to men like Thomas Horgan was irrevocably broken.
Today I sit at my computer exploring Trinity’s colonial legacies with my colleagues.
This summer I have spent my days exploring the college muniments – the needlessly archaic word for the college archives – assembling a picture of the college estates which demonstrates the unequivocally colonial nature of their management. Stories emerge from the archives of the Punjab veteran Captain Needham appointed by his father-in-law, Provost Richard McDonnell, to administer the college estates in Cahirciveen and nearby Valentia Island in the second half of the nineteenth century as though they were part of some imperial territory half-way around the world – one of those colonial outposts where Trinity men were expected to rule over the natives. I read about Captain Needham’s butter market, about the hotel he built, called the Trinity Arms (now sadly disappeared), and about his dealings with the other powerful local interest and former Trinity tenants – the O’Connells of Derrynane. The archives also reveal however the agency and voices of individual tenants who sought to improve their lot on the college estates. They appear as petitioners seeking redress from unjust treatment, defending their ancestors’ customary rights to timber and other natural resources and showing that they too were people with feelings, ambitions and a sense of their place and future in the world. While the college officers looked west to their colonial holdings on the ‘improvable’ frontier studying their accounts and surveys, their thousands of tenants perhaps on occasion inverted the colonial gaze to look east to where the parsons upon whose lands they toiled sat down to their dinner and said Grace.
We cannot know what Thomas and Bridie Horgan and their family and many thousands more like them would make of the choices made by successive generations of fellows of whom they chose to commemorate. They might however be pleased to know that as of June this year the Board of Trinity, once the body that ultimately signed off on their leases and rents, is in the process of considering a memorial in a prominent position on campus to the Trinity Tenants.
Earlier this year the naming of the Eavan Boland Library began the process of gendering the College’s monumental landscape. Previously it was the preserve of privileged males, those who benefited from the labour and hard-earned rent of the Trinity Tenants.
A new memorial would for the first time acknowledge their hidden but vital and sustained contribution to the university. That would bring its own sense of grace.
11/9/2025
Dr Patrick Walsh is associate professor in Eighteenth Century Irish History and co-director of the Trinity Colonial Legacies Project.
