A new TV documentary tells the story of land in Ireland through the history of one town - Kenmare, Co Kerry - and the 19th-century tyrant who ruled it. Rosita Boland reports
Land. A word that has always meant more in Ireland than merely its stark, literal definition. Land in Ireland is never just land. Over time, it has meant: poverty, if you had too little of it; starvation, when the crops on it failed; subservience, when it was owned by an absentee landlord; politics, when ownership of it became the subject of the Land League; independence, when you owned it; and, now, unimaginable wealth, if it's in the right place. Forget the harp. Our true national emblem is land.
Land is Gold - Kenmare and the Lansdowne Estate of South Kerry is the title of a new hour-long documentary produced and directed by Séan Ó Mórdha. The documentary has its genesis in a book, The Lansdowne Estate in Kerry under WS Trench, 1849-72, by Gerard Lyne, keeper of manuscripts at the National Library. Trench was the agent for the Lansdowne estate; an area of more than 96,000 acres in Kerry, most of it encompassing a large area of the Iveragh peninsula. The Lansdownes were, and remain, among the most prominent of the British aristocracy. The current marquis is the ninth of his line, Charles Lansdowne, and home is the vast family seat in Wiltshire, Bowood House. In the 19th century, they were among the biggest landowners in Ireland. Besides the vast tracts they owned outside the capital, they once owned most of what is now Dublin 4; a legacy seen in the name, Lansdowne Road.
Their Kerry estate was managed by WS Trench, the man who is the subject of Lyne's remarkable and award-winning book. Trench left meticulously detailed estate papers, which are held both in Kerry and at Bowood House, and these formed the basis of Lyne's research, carried out over 20 years. Watching the documentary, it's easy to imagine that, if Trench were alive today, he would be a hugely successful, deeply unpopular, and utterly ruthless businessman. He ran the Kerry estate as if it was a machine, efficiently and impersonally. He treated the tenants like commodities: valuable only under certain circumstances and always expendable, if needs be. "Astonishingly, nobody ever tried to assassinate either him or his son," Lyne reflects.
As Lyne explains in the documentary, Trench's driving concern on the estate was always to control its population. By controlling the population, he could control the economy of the estate. He abhorred the tradition of subdividing land among sons, seeing it as a one-way route to poverty in the establishment of smallholdings too small to support the people who lived on them, and thus he made it a rule that only one son could inherit the tenancy. The rest were forced either to emigrate or to find a trade outside farming. He also made it a rule of tenancy that no man could marry without his permission. The permission was nothing to do with the suitability of the partner, but everything to do with whether or not the tenancy could support another family.
"This was naturally deeply resented," says Lyne, who is himself from south Kerry, and whose ancestors were tenants on the Lansdowne estate. "The great-grandfathers of many people still living in Kerry would have gone cap in hand to Trench, looking for permission to marry."
The name of Trench and his methods of management are still the subject of deep feeling in Kerry today. His reputation is poor, yet history has revealed him to have been an excellent manager - a success achieved at the expense of tenants' happiness. Kenmare is a planned Lansdowne town, and today a charming one. Trench saw early on the potential for tourism.
Today, Kenmare has two five-star hotels, and the Iveragh peninsula is an area coveted by holiday house hunters and retiring executives. Descendants of tenants from Trench's time, local farmers and businessmen, appear in the documentary, most of which is shot in and around the Kenmare area. Through the Land Commission in the 1920s, they eventually acquired the rights to land they had long held tenancy on. The irony is that, having fought so long to own their land, some people in this beautiful part of Kerry are now selling it on, since it has become so valuable. Earlier this year alone, as an estate agent explains to camera, a 30-acre site near Kenmare sold for €18.5 million.
"The idea behind the documentary is that this was a microcosm of what has happened in so many parts of Ireland," Lyne says. "The appeal to me as a documentary-maker about the Lansdowne estate," explains Ó Mórdha, "was that I could investigate the estate and that hopefully its story would ripple and echo in every county in Ireland, and that people would think: that's our story, too. Through the local, we can understand national history." Land is Gold is a marvellously compelling documentary of social history, and is itself gold; a bright nugget of a story that is relevant to all of us.
Hidden History: Land is Gold - Kenmare and the Lansdowne Estate of South Kerry, produced by Séan Ó Mórdha, is on RTÉ 1, 10.15pm Tuesday