Alfred Haughton of Ardreigh House

Almost 35 years ago while working on the restoration of Ardreigh House as a family home workmen came across the names of what I assumed were the original men who had built the house. Those men wrote their names on floor joists between the basement and the first floor with the year 1850. This led me to believe that just a year after the Great Famine that left over one million Irish dead Alfred Haughton, a Quaker from Carlow, had built the house on the site of the medieval Ardreigh Castle overlooking the deserted medieval village of Ardreigh. Alfred Haughton also wrote his name on the wall of what was later to be the dining room before he had it decorated with favoured Victorian wallpaper of the time. Alfred was a son of Samuel Haughton and his third wife, Henrietta Osborne. The Haughton family were mill owners in Carlow and I have always assumed that the Ardreigh Mill which Ardreigh House overlooked was built the same time as the house. However, some notes written by Alfred Haughton in 1835 raised the question of whether the Ardreigh Mill, and indeed Ardreigh House, was built much earlier than the 1850s. A directory for Athy in 1846 showed amongst the ‘nobility, gentry and clergy’ Alfred Haughton of Ardreigh. This might tend to support the belief that both the mill and the house were built earlier than I had originally thought. 1835 was an eventful year for the Haughtons as recorded by Alfred in his review of the year. Just six years previously ‘an Act for the relief of his Majesty’s Roman Catholic subjects’ was passed in the Westminster Parliament and having received the Royal assent allowed Catholics to enter Parliament and have access to a variety of State and military positions. The Royal Commission of Enquiry, established in 1833 under the Chairmanship of the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, reported two years later that upwards of 75% of the labourers in Ireland were without regular employment. Three years later the Athy Literary Magazine carried a letter which claimed that Athy had ‘able bodied labourers at our corners, hoards of beggars at our doors, disease and famine in the hovels of the poor’. Athy was a town where wealth and abject poverty lived side by side and the Peace Preservation Force of the time would have had little impact on crime prevention. Was it to protect those inside houses such as Ardreigh House that windows were provided with strong wooden window shutters with iron bars to keep the shutters closed from the inside? Alfred Haughton in his 1835 writing refers to an intrusion into his home in Ardreigh. ‘In the spring of the year a ruffian came into my house at night and would have killed me but the Omnipotent enabled me to trust in him and gave me courage and firmness.’ The intruder was later identified as local Athy man Henry Rainsford whom the local newspapers reported was charged and convicted on 9th July 1835 at the Kildare assizes. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Later the death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. Henry Rainsford was transported to New South Wales, Australia on the ship ‘Hive’ which left Cobh on 24th August 1835 with 250 convicts on board. He left behind his wife Bridget and two children, Elizabeth aged 4 years and John, a one-year-old baby. The ship ran aground when entering Jervis Bay south of Sydney during the night of December 9th after a journey of almost three and a half months. With the loss of one crew member the rest of the crew and the convicts reached the shore and eventually arrived at their destination in New South Wales on Christmas Eve. Today Ardreigh House still has the original window shutters and the iron bars which were not sufficient to protect Alfred Haughton 189 years ago. Even closer to our time Ardreigh House, like several other similar houses in South Kildare, was raided for arms by the I.R.A. during the War of Independence. Alfred Haughton died in 1858 and Ardreigh Mill and Ardreigh House were subsequently purchased by the Hannon family who like the Haughtons were mill owners in Carlow and elsewhere. What happened Henry Rainsford I do not yet know but the story of his wife Bridget and his two young children who were left behind in Athy will hopefully be told at another time.

Aidan Higgins, Irish writer and Mick Degan, Athy man mentioned in Hibbins' novel 'Dog Days'

It was fifty-eight years ago that I first came across the writings of Aidan Higgins when his second book ‘Langrishe Go Down’ was published to critical acclaim. Born in Celbridge in 1927 his first book ‘Felo de Se’, a short story collection, was his introduction as a new Irish writer who would emerge six years later to be described by Fintan O’Toole as ‘the coming literary man, not just in Ireland but throughout Europe.’ I was a member of a small committee led by the writer Neil Donnelly which organised the weekend literary celebration ‘Aidan Higgins at 80’ in St. Raphael’s, Celbridge over a May weekend in 2007. It was a weekend graced by the presence and active participation of such great writers as Dermot Healy, Fintan O’Toole, John Banville, poet Derek Mahon and the American novelist Annie Proulx. Athy was represented by the world class photographer John Minihan, several of whose photographic images illustrated the weekend programme. It was a rare opportunity to meet Aidan Higgins and to talk to the writer whom I had first met many years previously during a reading at a literary festival. I was interested in following up a claim made to me following the publication in 1998 of his book, ‘Dog Days’ which gives an account of life in Dublin while Higgins was living in nearby Brittas, Co. Wicklow. My informant had then claimed that a native son of Athy featured in Aidan Higgins’s ‘Dog Days’. He named Mick Deegan, whose brothers Joe and Jack were well known to the people of Athy, while another brother in Donegal, Monsignor Patrick Deegan, was perhaps less well known in the South Kildare town. Mick Deegan had a small shop on the corner of Avoca Road in Dublin where he had a thriving business. He was described by Seamus Dowling in his recent memoirs ‘Flowers that Bloometh’ as a colourful personality who was rarely seen without the butt of a cigarette hanging from the side of his lip. Seamus, who is the bridge correspondent for the Irish Times, described Mick Deegan as ‘a small, squat figure with a neck so big he could not get shirts to fit him in the usual retail outlets who knew his customers and had a brief chat – benign gossip – with everyone of them. He would douse a cigarette when he saw his wife coming across the road, where they lived.’ Aidan Higgins in his book ‘Dog Days’ wrote of Deegan. ‘Customers came in for loaves of Boland’s bread and bottles of Lucan Dairy and Mick serves them absently, lost in the dream where Glen Rock is hitting the rails at White City or coming drugged from the No. 2 box. His big redfaced son is in the Gardai. His shop smells like a country shop in the country of my childhook (King’s in Celbride) when everything alarmed me. Mick looks dead-beat. He lights up a fag, covers his puffy face with a soft stubby hand, the index finger darkly stained. MAN HELD FOR PUB MURDER declares the Evening Press headline. The Ballymore Eustace haulier John Lawlor had been shot dead by the Provos in Timmon’s public house in Essex Street one lunchtime: summoned there by the hit-man ordered to “execute” him and shot with as little compunction as the killer would have given a mad dog; Lawlor sipping the coldest pint he was ever to swallow. Mick heaves a heavy sigh, licks his fingers, turns a page.’ Aidan Higgins confirmed to me that the Mick referenced in ‘Dog Days’ was indeed Mick Deegan, the man whom however he did not know was from the same county as himself. The ‘Aidan Higgins at 80’ celebration was a great success, largely due to the work of Neil Donnelly. It was also a well-deserved tribute to an Irish writer whom John Banville described as ‘a major figure in Irish writing in the 20th century, a link between the high modernists Joyce and Beckett and the more restrained generation of writers that followed him.’ Aidan Higgins died in December 2015 and as I finished writing this piece I have on my desk the sixty page publication which was produced for the 80th birthday celebration under the title ‘A Trade Recondite as Falconry’ which was Aidan Higgins’s definition of creative writing.

Athy's Catholic Churches

Ten years ago I wrote the following opening paragraph for my article celebrating the 40th anniversary of the opening of St. Michael’s Parish Church. ‘The new Parish Church of St. Michaels at Athy was blessed and opened on Sunday by his Grace Most Rev. Dr. John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin.’ That was the opening line of the report in the Nationalist and Leinster Times of Friday, 24th April 1964, recorded the result of an eleven-year campaign by the people of Athy to replace the Church which has stood on the same site since 1808. The new Church, designed in the Lombardic Romanesque style with a seating capacity of 1,100, replaced an earlier Church which in the words of John Gartland, Consulting Engineer ‘suffered all the defects and all the disadvantages of a building erected a few years after the 1798 Rebellion.’ I am writing this week’s article on the morning of Friday, 19th April, exactly sixty years to the day when the late Archbishop of Dublin blessed and opened what was the latest in a series of parish churches serving the community of Athy. I believe that the first Parish Church in the medieval village of Athy was the ‘Crickeen’, located in St. Michael’s Cemetery. Partially restored recently the ‘Crickeen’ was built outside the Anglo-Norman medieval village to serve the needs of the Irish betagh or villeins. Inside the village the French speaking settlers who shared the same Catholic religion with the native Irish, had a monastery on the West bank of the River Barrow and a Dominican Friary on the opposite side of the river. The Reformation of the 1540s witnessed the closure of the Dominican Friary, the Monastery next to Woodstock Castle having been previously vacated, while the small Parish Church is believed to have been closed or appropriated for Protestant services. The medieval village centred around Woodstock Castle on the west bank of the River Barrow was in time relocated to the more easily defended east side of the river. It was there that in the mid-17th century a church was built in what we now know as the back square for the Anglican church community. It would be some time in the following century before a small church for the Catholic faithful was discreetly built off Chapel Lane. That church was burned down on the night of 7th March 1800 at a time when conflict during and following the 1798 Rebellion saw several Catholic churches destroyed. The then Parish Priest, Fr. Maurice Keegan, who served in Athy from 1789-1825, lodged a malicious damage claim with Dublin Castle and received compensation of three hundred pounds. For almost eight years the Catholic parishioners of Athy were without a church and Mass was celebrated for a time in the town centre square under a temporary canopy erected on the side of the Town Hall. A new church was finally built in 1808 on part of what was known as Clonmullin commonage. The site was formally granted by the Duke of Leinster to Thomas Fitzgerald of Geraldine Lodge, Thomas Dunne of Leinster Lodge and Michael Cahill of Athy as Trustees on behalf of St. Michael’s Parish. The sum of two thousand pounds was spent on building the church which continued to be used until its demolition in 1960. My readers of a certain age will remember that church which was built in the traditional cruciform style with three galleries. They will remember the silver collection at the door of the main gallery over the nave, while a copper collection was sufficient for entry to either of the two side galleries. I served Mass for several years in old St. Michael’s Church and well remember Fr. John McLoughlin who was the senior curate under Archdeacon Patrick McDonnell. It was Fr. McLoughlin who in 1952 announced the setting up of a fundraising committee comprised of local men and women who over the following ten years or more collected almost ninety-three thousand pounds for the building of the new church. The new St. Michael’s Parish Church was built at a cost of approximately two hundred thousand pounds and opened on the 19th of April 1964, long after Fr. McLoughlin and Archdeacon McDonnell had left us. An interesting feature of the old church, demolished in 1960, was the church organ donated while Monsignor Andrew Quinn was Parish Priest. He served in Athy from 1853-1879, while his two brothers served as Bishops in Australia. The church organ, donated by a Quinn family member, was not retained for the new church and I am not aware what happened to it. Retained and used in the new church was the marble pulpit gifted by local parishioners in 1904 to mark the Golden Jubilee of Canon James Germaine’s ordination. The Canon was Parish Priest in St. Michael’s from 1892-1905. Also retained and reused were the altar rails which were the gift of Count O’Loughlin, a Kilkenny man, who made his fortune in Australia. Following his death his estate presented the railings to his relation, Canon Edward Mackey, who was Parish Priest from 1909-1928. Various other items were donated for the new church by the men’s and women’s sodalities, as well as employees of the Wallboard factory and staff of Athy Railway Station. Mrs. John Owens of Nicholastown donated the windows in the church nave, while a shrine to St. Joseph was donated by Tony Byrne of London and formerly of St. Joseph’s Terrace. Can anyone give me any information on Tony Byrne? Fifty years after the opening of St. Michael’s Church, its Golden Jubilee was celebrated. This April marks the sixtieth anniversary of that happy and historic event. It is a happy coincidence that one of my secretaries who has been working with me since 1982 shares a birthday with our Parish Church. Wishing my secretary, who shall remain nameless, a Happy Birthday. The previously announced meeting of Athy History Society which was to be held in the Community Arts Centre will now take place in the Town Library on Thursday 9th May at 7pm.