An Irish inferno

Between 1919 and 1923, in the War of Independence and the subsequent civil war, nearly 300 country houses were burned in Ireland. To mark the centenary of the events, Terence Dooley re-appraises the motives behind this destruction

- Terence Dooley

LATE on the night of February 4, 1921, a local company of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) came to Summerhill House, Co Meath, home of the 5th Baron Langford, and knocked very loudly on the back door. The men came on the orders of the Irish revolutionary and politician Michael Collins (Fig 1) to burn the house. Local IRA leader Seán Boylan later claimed that Collins had been told that Summerhill—a magnificent Palladian pile referred to as ‘the Irish Versailles’, believed to have been designed by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce and built for Hercules Langford Rowley in the early 1730s (Fig 7)—was to be used as a barracks by Crown forces. As the house was strategically located ‘on high ground which commanded one of the routes to the west’, its destruction was imperative to the IRA’s freedom of movement.

The butler and a handful of servants who were present took the decision not to open the door. It was futile; the raiders simply broke in and forced the servants to flee to the woods. They sprinkled drums of petrol over the floors and doused furniture they had piled into the middle of rooms, before turning the house into a conflagration that lit up the night sky. The house was ‘reduced to a mass of blackened ruins’ with the almost complete loss of its contents.