Big House Burnings in County Cork During the Irish Revolution, 1920–21*
James S. Big House Burnings Donnelly, Jr. in County Cork during the Irish Revolution, 1920–21* Introduction The burning of Big Houses belonging to landed Protestants and the occasional Catholic was one of the most dramatic features of the Irish Revolution of 1919–23. Of course, the Protestant landed elite was only a shadow of its former self in the southern parts of Ireland by the time that revolution erupted in 1919. But even where land- owners had sold their estates to their tenants, they usually retained considerable demesnes that they farmed commercially, and they still held a variety of appointments under the British crown—as lieuten- ants or deputy lieutenants of counties and as justices of the peace. Symbols of an old regime in landownership that was not yet dead, and loyal to the British crown and empire, members of the tradi- tional elite were objects of suspicion and sometimes outright hostil- ity among IRA members and nationalists more generally. For many Southern Unionists or loyalists with Big Houses and some land, life became extremely uncomfortable and often dangerous after 1919. Nowhere was this truer than in County Cork. In his important study The Decline of the Big House in Ireland, Terence Dooley put *I wish to express my gratitude to careful readers of this article in earlier drafts, including Fergus Campbell, L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Ian d’Alton, Tom Dunne, and Cal Hyland. While saving me from errors, they also made valuable suggestions. I must thank Leigh-Ann Coffey for generously allowing me to draw upon her digitized col- lection of documents from the Colonial Office records pertaining to the Irish Grants Committee at the U.K.
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