This blog is a personal take on Listowel, Co. Kerry. I am writing for anyone anywhere with a Listowel connection but especially for sons and daughters of Listowel who find themselves far from home. Contact me at listowelconnection@gmail.com

Tag: Lord Ormathwaite

Covid 19 cartoons, a murder and poem

Chris Grayson’s Killorglin

Old photo of Presentation Convent, Listowel

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Preparing for Culture Night 2019


Paul Shannon, Sinead McDonnell and Aimee Keane

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Mike O’Donnell’s Covid 19 Sketches


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A Young Fred Chute and Friends

Thank you, Elizabeth O’Carroll for the photographs.

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Lord Ormathwaite, a murder and the land war


The murder of a ‘land-grabber’ and the Land War in Kerry. By Mark Holan

A thunderstorm swept across Pittsburgh in the early morning hours of Aug. 22, 1923. Winds gusted to 35 miles per hour and dropped the temperature to 51 degrees before daybreak. The thermometer barely had reached 60 degrees as Nora Foran Scanlon set off for a notary’s office about a mile from her apartment in one of the city’s Irish enclaves.

It’s likely she was wearing her best Sunday morning dress as a sign of respect to the notary and in memory of her late father. Her purse would have been stuffed to bursting with letters and documents related to rectifying what she attested to the notary had been a “violation of justice” 35 years earlier along a rural road in County Kerry. Her sworn affidavit told the story: “My father held an evicted farm in the vicinity of Listowel, Coolaclarig. He was boycotted to the meanest extreme and finally shot to death.”

The murder of John Foran was one of over 100 killings associated with the Land War.

Nearly 100 agrarian murders occurred in Ireland from the start of the Land War in 1879 through the conclusion of the Parliamentary special commission on “Parnellism and Crime.” This story explores the viciousness of the period by looking at the case of one family. The murder of boycotted farmer John Foran caught the attention of newspapers and Parliament and echoed up to the founding of the Irish Free State.

The Foran family and 19th century Listowel

Nora Foran had grown up near the North Kerry market town of Listowel, about eight miles southeast of where the River Shannon empties into the Atlantic. Knocanore Hill, an 880-foot summit isolated from Kerry’s taller southern mountain ranges, is another area landmark. Then, as today, the district is dominated by farms and bogs.

The Foran family were from Listowel, north Kerry, where they farmed a 150 acre lease in the Tullamore townland.

Nora’s father, John Foran, had grown up there, too. He’d been in his early twenties when a potato blight and English indifference triggered Ireland’s Great Famine. He’d seen widespread starvation and death as Kerry’s population plummeted 18 percent between 1841–1851.

Property records for 1851 show John Foran (either Nora’s father or his father) was farming a 150-acre lease in Tullamore townland, about five miles north of Listowel on the east side of Knocanore. Foran leased the land from John Benn-Walsh’s estate of nearly 9,000 acres, which had been acquired from the 3rd Earl of Kerry in the early 1770s. The estate included another 2,200 acres in neighboring County Cork and holdings in England and Wales.

Benn-Walsh was a British politician and the first Lord Ormathwaite—taking the name from his County Cumberland property in northwest England. His North Kerry estate was larger than most, but dwarfed by a handful of others. Foran’s farm was among 1,900 acres in Galey civil parish, where Ormathwaite maintained his mansion Tullamore House and a smaller residence called Duagh Glebe, a few miles east of Listowel.

The Foran’s farm was a large sub-lease within the 1,900 acre estate of Lord Ormathwaite.

Omathwaite considered his purchase of Coolaclarig opposite Tullamore to be “a very good investment,” according to his surviving journals. In 1858 he hired George Sandes as local agent for his properties. Sandes was a North Kerry native and lawyer, but the agent position made him very unpopular among the locals……..

You can read the rest of Mark Horan’s account of the story HERE

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Another Covid 19 Isolation Poem


Róisín Meaney

I ate my way through last week,

As I waited for covid to peak

I must try harder

To bypass the larder,

Or I’ll never regain my physique. 

Jill Friedman’s Listowel, poet John McGrath, Lord Omathwaite and Spanish Flu

Still Working

A KWD refuse truck passes Listowel Garda Station on March 26 2020

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Local poet, John McGrath shared this poem on Facebook. I know it will resonate with many of my emigrant readers.

The Week after St Patrick’s

The week after St Patrick’s, my mother

pressed his suit and packed his case,

Then drove him to the station for the early train

from Ballyhaunis to the crowded boat,

Then on to Manchester and solitude

until All Souls came slowly round again.

I don’t remember ever saying Goodbye.

At seventeen I took the train myself

and saw first-hand my father’s box-room life,

the Woodbines by his shabby single bed.

I don’t remember ever saying Hello

Just sat beside this stranger in the gloom

and talked of home and life, and all the while

I wanted to be gone, get on with mine.

Westerns and ‘The Western’ kept him sane,

newspapers from home until the time

to take the train came slowly round once more.

Lost in Louis L’Amour, he seldom heard

the toilet’s ugly flush, the gurgling bath

next door. Zane Grey dulled the traffic’s

angry roar, outside his grimy window.

Back home the year before he died we spoke

at last as equals, smoked our cigarettes,

his a Woodbine still, and mine a tipped;

My mother would have killed us if she’d known.

The phone-call came as Winter turned to Spring

I stood beside him, touched his face of ice

And knew our last Hello had been Goodbye.

John McGrath March 2018

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Jill Friedman’s Kerry


Internationally renowned photographer, Jill Friedman took these photographs on trip to The Kingdom.

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Lord Ormathwaite


Lord Ormathwaite was mentioned in one of the old stories last week. Kay Caball has come across him in her research.

In 1770, John Walsh  (uncle-in-law of John Benn Walsh, Lord Ormathwaite) had purchased land from Francis Thomas Fitzmaurice, 3rd earl of Kerry, in both Clanmaurice and Iraghticonnor for £15,230, and again, in 1774, for £5,944.  John Walsh, was a wealthy nabob, born in Madras, who returned from India to Britain after the battle Plassey.  He became an MP, with a country estate in Berkshire.  He bequeathed his Irish estates after his death to his niece Margaret Benn-Walsh in trust for her son, who became Lord Ormathwaite, owning  9,000 acres in north Kerry at the time of the Great Famine.[1]

Sir John Benn WLSH (later Lord Ormathwaite) visited north Kerry in 1823 -1864 and kept a journal relating  these visits to the different [named] tenants.     Excerpts from this journal are published in John D. Pierse’s book Teampall Bán: Aspects of the Famine in north Kerry 1845-1852, p. 241



[1] Kay Caball, The Fall of the Fitzmaurices: The Demise of Kerry’s First Family.


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North Kerry and The Spanish Flu


The last great pandemic was the Spanish flu, which ravaged the world in the years after World War 2

Photo from Ballydonoghue Parish Magazine 2018 shows workmen wearing masks.

This magazine has a very informative article about the pandemic.

 North Kerry was particularly hard hit, with many deaths.

In 1918 532 deaths were reported in the Listowel district. As well as the flu, people died of TB and  natural causes and many had lingering injuries acquired on the battle front.

Irishgenealogy,ie has a database of civil and church records that hold fascinating information. If you want to know how your ancestors fared during this last pandemic you could search the death records. Each entry records the cause of death and the duration of the final illness. If you make any interesting discoveries, we’d love to know.



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