Terence Dooley and Christopher Ridgway’s The Irish Country House assumes that “big houses” in Ireland (significantly, rarely referred to in this volume by that vaguely pejorative local term) are by now an essential and enduring part of Ireland’s heritage. Dooley’s The Decline of the Big House in Ireland (2001), a work that did much to focus preservation concern about such buildings, serves as a major reference point in this new publication. Dooley’s institution, National University of Ireland Maynooth, now houses a center offering a master of arts in historic house studies. Evidencing activity in a burgeoning academic field, this collection of essays from a range of disciplines emerges from that organization’s Annual Historic Houses of Ireland Conferences.

R. V. Comerford’s foreword sets up the volume’s agenda in a more confrontational manner than it might, labeling postindependence uneasiness with the big house inheritance as “absolutist” and “largely philistine” in contrast to private and voluntary efforts to save big houses termed “spectacular “and “heroic” (12). Dooley and Ridgway’s preface concurs, contrasting an unregenerate “stark oppositional (often oversimplified) framework of the dispossessed” to the important work being done by academics, owners, and aesthetes who are replacing “animosity, vandalism and neglect” with “appreciation, preservation, and restoration” (15). But some assumptions warrant significant unpacking. In The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997), Peter Mandler notes that country house nostalgia and preservation, even in Britain, has been only a post–World War II phenomenon, gaining popularity with a political turn to the right. Certainly Ireland’s neglect of country houses after independence is too easily dismissed as philistinism. Running throughout the volume, most evident in Ridgway’s English-centered essay, is the questionable effort to draw Ireland into the model of the British National Trust.

The volume’s framers deplore that well into the late twentieth century Irish country houses were viewed as white elephants, oversized symbols of elite colonial privilege, deserving little protection. Responses in the collection are various and include, for example, a critique of the wanton destructiveness assumed evident in the burning of three hundred houses during the War of Independence and Civil War; a recurring attack on the philistinism of postindependence Ireland for presiding over the deterioration (or worse) of more houses; an appeal to the aesthetic significance of country houses—more difficult in Ireland than England because so many encumbered Irish landlords stripped interiors of valuable contents—a strategy advocating the educational opportunities inherent in well-structured country house visits; a movement to catalog and digitalize remaining collections (of music-related artifacts) in houses; detailed historical studies of aesthetically significant country estates; generally celebratory accounts of affluent new owners, many from England, Europe, or the United States, who undertake the “rescue” of such houses as private vacation homes, hotels, and leisure centers for a new elite; and the move to position the country house as the center of heritage industry tourism.

The Irish Country House will satisfy readers already convinced of the centrality of such buildings to Ireland’s heritage, but others may demand more historically nuanced arguments before accepting that very recent notion. Several essays gesture toward sensible solutions to neglect, but collectively the volume might have integrated the Irish country house more fully into historical contexts embracing wider ideological perspectives. It would have been useful to read more than Ridgway’s buried discussion of the creation of the big house and Famine Museum at the Strokestown Park House complex. There, a successful tourism enterprise situates a Palladian big house squarely into an ideologically comprehensive narrative encompassing the competing claims for Irish land by Famine-era tenants and an evicting landlord. Strokestown’s achievement mirrors the kind of deep historical contextualizing that recent upstairs/downstairs exhibitions in National Trust properties cited in the volume have sought, far less comprehensively, to signal.

Despite the volume’s sympathy with landlords as financially beset victims of early twentieth-century violence, owners do not emerge as particularly admirable. Patrick Cosgrove establishes how extraordinarily generous the 1903 Wyndham Land Act was to Irish landlords. Although emphasizing the act’s failure to prevent future agrarian agitation by landless and evicted laborers, Cosgrove confirms what a rich lode of fiction written from within the house—by Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, and Molly Keane—makes so clear: the typical Irish landlord’s isolation from the entrepreneurial demands of modern life.

Ciarán Reilly’s contribution explores the disproportionately high number of estate houses destroyed in County Offaly between the beginning of the War of Independence and the end of the Civil War. Echoing Cosgrove, this essay emphasizes the Wyndham Act’s failure to appease the land hunger of small tenants or landless laborers that led to years of agrarian violence and arguably “masked acts of egregious vandalism, or were a convenient cloak behind which to hide acts of more vindictive, petty or parochial nature, more often than not, it seems, linked to the long-standing Irish land question” (133). But a reading as responsive to tenants as to landlords’ needs might reveal that the “good” landowners described by local newspapers—those who employed and therefore supported many—were unprotected by paternalistic benevolence in the face of a rapidly transformed republican ideology focusing on land distribution, not just on independence. Reilly’s sympathy for dispossessed landlords conveys a touch of irony as one visiting descendent of a burned-out house conveys his nostalgia for a lost world, an anger at “the blackguards who burned it,” and a regret that the site had been invaded by electricity pylons (132). Again, the move into modernity is the enemy.

Patrick Walsh’s essay on Castletown, County Kildare, the headquarters of the Irish Georgian Society, and Judith Hill’s contribution on the Quin family’s half-century (1810–60) project of constructing a Tudor manor house in Adare, County Limerick, both focus on the politically semiotic roles of notable houses. Like Toby Bernard in Making the Grand Figure (New Haven, CT, 2004), Walsh and Hill address the social implications of country house architecture that flaunted imperial ambitions: Ireland as part of Britain’s new Rome. Castletown’s enormous size and Italianate classical style typical of eighteenth-century homes was unrelated to its Irish setting but asserted the role of architecture as a source of political power and social mobility for its owner. Hill reads the paternalistic landlords at Adare as turning to Tudor gothic architecture to profess their role maintaining Union in a period of rising nationalism. In the face of this enormously expensive private building project that coincided with the Famine, Hill presents the Quins as the familiar “good” landlord. If politically conservative and paternalistic, they provided economic support for up to 137 people serving them, although Hill admits to lacking facts about the “exact economic position” (80) of Dunraven craftsmen. Ridgway and others argue that country houses are now being seen not just as “treasure houses” but also as “story houses” (335). But such houses must be situated in contexts satisfying not just to the appetite for upstairs/downstairs anecdote but also for constructing historical accounts. To relate comprehensive historical narratives, we need still fuller information about both estate landlords and their tenants, presented so as to avoid easy blame.