INTERVIEW: The colourful members of the Irish Georgian Society have spent 50 years fighting for the protection of 18th-century architecture. Often, they have hit a a wall of indifference, as a new book by Robert O'Byrne chronicles
ROBERT O'BYRNE HAS a friend who used to live near Mount Juliet House in Co Kilkenny, and was friendly with the family who lived there. The house is now a luxury hotel and golf resort and a couple of years ago, O'Byrne and his friend decided to pay it a visit. "We were met on the threshold by a uniformed doorman who told us we couldn't enter there, and directed us down to a rather grim bar in the basement," O'Byrne says.
The snobbishness is bad enough (though O'Byrne emphasises that the doorman was only doing his job). But what really incenses O'Byrne is that those who have transformed these historic Irish country houses into such establishments are full of self-congratulation when they should, in his view, be ashamed. "People think that because a house has been restored, it has been saved," he says. "But if the original contents are dispersed, extensions are added, the parkland is built over and the landscape is altered - the house has actually been ruined."
Among other "worst offenders", he lists Farnham in Co Cavan and Lough Rynn in Co Leitrim, both now "posh hotels". The "greatest loss" was the demesne at Carton, in Co Kildare. Although the house, the former home of successive earls of Kildare and dukes of Leinster, has been sensitively restored, too many houses have been built in the grounds, along with "not one but two golf courses". The index of O'Byrne's handsome and eloquent new book, Irish Georgian Society: A Celebration, contains a telling entry: "Golf, baleful influence of."
The worst thing about Carton is that it lay within the power of the Irish State to save it. It came on the market in 1976, and the Irish Georgian Society (IGS) and others tried to persuade the State to intervene. But, not for the first time and not for the last, the Government declined. More recently, it declined to buy Lissadell and its contents in Co Sligo, though it was the home of Constance Markievicz and has strong associations with WB Yeats.
It was to Carton that around 100 people were invited to tea by Desmond and Mariga Guinness in 1958. The couple were renting the magnificent house while searching for a similar property to buy (they eventually bought Leixlip Castle). The tea party followed a letter from Guinness in The Irish Times in which he proposed reviving the apparently lapsed IGS in order "to fight for what is left of Georgian architecture in Ireland".
O'Byrne's book ably chronicles that fight, detailing the skirmishes and full-scale battles in which the IGS and other like-minded conservationists sometimes succeeded in saving wonderful 18th-century buildings and demesnes, and how they sometimes failed. They were up against formidable barriers: a lingering Irish hostility towards the landed gentry, a costly legacy of decay and neglect, and, perhaps above all, the indifference of most Irish people.
Many great Irish country houses had been burned down in the war-torn early years of the 20th century, and many were abandoned, left to go to ruin or demolished in the years that followed. Molly Keane wrote in 1989 that Russia had suffered many wrongs at the hands of its aristocracy, but that the Soviet regime had had the good sense to preserve the old treasures. Elizabeth Bowen sold Bowen's Court in Co Cork on the understanding that the new owner would live in the house. Within a year, it had been demolished.
Until the 1960s, Dublin's Georgian streetscapes were mostly intact, though declining largely, O'Byrne acknowledges, because the State had no money to spend on them. Seán Ó Faoláin wonderfully evokes the charm of their characteristic brickwork, when he writes "chromatised and mellowed by centuries of wind and weather into a shifting array that glows now like ruby port, now like a saffron sherry, now like a primrose muscatel".
Enter Sam Stephenson, the brash young architect whose company won the contract to replace 16 Georgian houses on Fitzwilliam Street demolished by the ESB with the Government's blessing. The IGS and its allies had mobilised wide public support for their campaign to save the houses, which formed part of Europe's longest unbroken line of Georgian houses. More than 1,000 people turned up for a meeting at which artist Sean Keating warned that if this wanton destruction went ahead, "the next move will be to feed the books in the library at Trinity College to the boilers of the Pigeon House".
A year later, Stephenson declared that Dubliners were being done a disservice by "the antics of the so-called responsible citizens" who were calling for the preservation of the city. Georgian Dublin was shoddily built and 18th-century good taste was a myth. O'Byrne lets the photographs speak for themselves, with a vista of the street before the demolition facing one with the dreary new concrete block. O'Byrne notes that the ESB, "by way of restitution for the earlier act of vandalism", restored its remaining Georgian properties in 1988, opening one of them as the Georgian House Museum.
Some of the IGS's battles had mixed results. It fought to save Mountjoy Square and succeeded to an extent, but it made powerful enemies in the process. Many of Dublin's Georgian houses had become grossly overcrowded tenement slums. The most spectacular outburst came in 1970 during a five-hour Dáil speech by the Fianna Fáil minister Kevin Boland. He derided "a consortium of belted earls and their ladies, and left-wing intellectuals . . ." and poured contempt on the "Guinness nobility" who were keen to preserve "the reminder of gracious living at the expense of the slavies and lackies subsisting in the less gracious cellars and back lanes". Unfair, says O'Byrne. "The society agreed that everyone was entitled to decent housing."
On the other hand, the IGS was criticised for being ineffective. Frank McDonald, this paper's Environment Editor, in his 1985 polemic The Destruction of Dublin described the IGS's early members as "dilettantes". It is true, O'Byrne agrees, that they were amateurs but their dedication was all the more remarkable for that. The property speculators had the backing of banks and powerful politicians. The IGS had to raise all its funds and relied heavily on donations from wealthy Americans.
The glamour of some of the fund-raising activities undoubtedly fuelled the resentment. O'Byrne, a former social columnist, describes with obvious delight balls, "thés dansants", house parties, picnics, jaunts to grand European houses, and top-hatted cricket matches. He goes on just a little tiresomely about the cricket.
The games included an annual cross-Border encounter between a team from the IGS and one from the North's National Trust. After several pages on this, O'Byrne notes briskly that "unfortunately rising levels of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland led to the suspension of the game from 1969 onwards".
At one match, O'Byrne enthuses, Mariga Guinness looks "like a figure from a Tiepolo fresco in an enormous turban topped with ostrich feathers," while Agnes Bernelle, then married to Desmond Leslie, is "mysteriously veiled as though she had just emerged from the seraglio". The book is dedicated to the Guinnesses and includes many photographs, such as the one of Desmond Guinness and children on the cover of this magazine, which show that they were stunningly beautiful people.
One (on the previous page), from Vogue's Book of Houses and Gardens, shows Mariga reclining on a trunk in the hall of her home, Leixlip Castle. Another shows Desmond sitting on a velvet sofa at Castletown House between Marianne Faithful and Mick Jagger. "Vin rosé," Mariga is reported to have said, "nourishes the Georgian society."
But they were also prodigious workers. There are photographs of Mariga, a German princess, scrubbing floors, up ladders with paintbrushes, and holding placards at demonstrations. "She was charismatic and he was shy. She was dynamic, but also very down to earth. He was more assiduous about following things through," says conservation architect Marian Cashman, who got involved in the IGS as a schoolgirl. "They inspired people. They were a catalyst."
In later years, there was a divorce and Desmond got married again to Penelope, his present wife. Marianne Faithful yields in the pictures to Bianca Jagger and then Jerry Hall. Mariga died at the age of 56.
In 1983, newly graduated from Trinity, Christopher Moore, now a lecturer in fine art and a member of the Castletown House Foundation, was invited by Anne Cruikshank to be the curator of the house in Co Kildare, one of Ireland's grandest. This has been the IGS's largest single project, involving hundreds of volunteers as well as experts and skilled craftspeople. "It was an extraordinary centre of passionate restoration," he says. "But it was also absolutely poverty stricken. In Ireland in the 1980s, everything was against the luxury of saving a great house.
"Castletown was always a combination of the day-to-day grind and the majesty of the place," he says. "I remember organising the Red Cross Ball in bitter November weather. I never encountered cold like the cold at Castletown. We had to do pheasant for hundreds. But I was very lucky. As curator, I was allowed to sleep in Lady Louisa Connolly's four-poster bed. At night when the visitors had gone, you had those palatial rooms to yourself."
Moore insists that the IGS is neither elitist nor pompous. "We can still get hundreds of volunteers to come and work with us," he says. "And the YIGS - members of the young Irish Georgian Society - are very egalitarian. A lot of them are art or architecture students."
The book is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the revival of the IGS and as such has its longeurs, including the necessary lists and photographs of those without whom it would not have been possible. Some individuals stand out, including the late Brian Molloy, who abandoned his law degree to help the IGS restore properties including Charleville Forest, the Robertstown Festa, Damer House in Roscrea and Doneraile Court in Co Cork.
Molloy brought the derelict Roundwood in Co Laois back to life and guests remember his hospitality, with candlelight, bouquets of wild flowers and "music floating out from somewhere". Doneraile, restored by the IGS and others, has since been taken over by the State and allowed to fall into disuse again.
Tom Alexander and his wife, Mary, both accountants, are among the doughty souls who have taken on the restoration of a big 18th-century house as their home. Since 2003, they have been living in and working on Gloster House in Co Offaly. "We just always hankered after the style and the grandeur, the proportions of the rooms, the plasterwork, and the idea of evoking the past," he says. The house was "almost unliveable" with rotten floors, collapsing ceilings, no plumbing and a dodgy roof. The gardens were full of blocked fountains.
"We begged, borrowed and stole," Alexander says. He praises section 482 of the planning act which gives tax relief on the costs of restoration. They've also had help from the local council and the Heritage Council, as well as advice from the IGS. The fountains are flowing again, gravity-fed from the streams and springs in the grounds and the hills behind the house.
Much has been saved, including the ancient oak forests at Coollattin in Co Wicklow. The 3,000-acre estate had been owned by the Fitzwilliam family for two centuries when it came up for sale in 1977. It was bought by speculators, who proceeded to break it up. But after a sustained battle by preservationists, including Kathy Gilfillan, the knight of Glin Desmond FitzGerald and Thomas Pakenham, the Government was persuaded to buy the woods.
The IGS now works alongside bodies such as An Taisce, the Irish Heritage Trust and Fáilte Ireland. "Apart from anything else, there has finally been a realisation that tourists don't come to Ireland to see ribbon developments of dormer bungalows," comments O'Byrne.
The Irish Georgian Society: A Celebration, by Robert O'Byrne is published by the Irish Georgian Society, €70. See www.igs.ie