A photograph emerges of a former Comerford house in Courtown, Co Wexford

Invermore House, Courtown, Co Wexford … built for the Earls of Courtown, and once the home of Eva Mary Comerford and her daughter Máire who ran a school there (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Almost a decade has passed since I went in search of the house in Courtown, Co Wexford, where Eva Mary Comerford and her daughter, the Irish revolutionary journalist Máire Comerford, had lived in the early decades of the 20th century.

I had failed to in my attempt to add to my collection of images of Comerford family homes, and left disappointed, having found only an empty field and a pile of rubble in where Invermore House once stood.

But a comment posted early on Monday morning (22 June 2020) by an anonymous reader on that blog posting describing my fruitless search over eight years ago (27 January 2012) has helped me to find a photograph of Invermore House where these two Comerford women, mother and daughter, lived and ran a private school over 100 years ago.

For many years, a photograph in the Eason Photographic Collection in the National Library of Ireland (NLI Ref: EAS 3736) had been titled ‘Mansion near Gorey, Co Wexford.’ The photograph was taken by an unknown photographer in the first few decades of the last century.

However, a Flickr Commons user known only as B-59 was the first person online to identify the front door and this research has established that this is Invermore House or Levuka House, Courtown, Co Wexford.

The house was designed in the 19th century by Thomas Newenham Deane and built for the Scott family. At times, it was known as Levuka, and later as Invermore, and for a time it had been the north Wexford home of Eva Mary Comerford and her daughter Máire.

Eva Mary Comerford (1860-1949) was the widow of James Charles Comerford (1842-1907), of Ardavon House, Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, a miller and a friend of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Eva Comerford was three times tennis champion of Ireland. Her father, Colonel Thomas Esmonde (1829-1872), was decorated with the Victoria Cross (VC) for his part in the Battle of Sebastopol. She was a niece of Sir John Esmonde (1826-1876), 10th baronet and a Liberal MP, and a first cousin of both Sir Thomas Esmonde (1862-1935), 11th baronet, MP for North Wexford and later a Senator, and Sir Laurence Grattan Esmonde (1863-1943), 13th Baronet.

For a time after her husband’s death, Eva Mary Comerford lived with her brother, Thomas Louis Esmonde (1864-1918) of Gorey, Co Wexford. In 1913, Thomas married Mary Mansfield, and Eva’s daughter, Máire Comerford (1893-1982), returned to Ireland from London around 1915 to live in Co Wexford with her widowed mother, uncle and aunt.

Eva Comerford and her daughter Máire (born Mary Eva Comerford) then rented Invermore House in Courtown, Co Wexford, and there they set up a school for girls, where Máire was a teacher for a time. Despite her strong Republican politics, Máire Comerford was the second cousin of three baronets who were elected as Fine Gael TDs for Co Wexford: Sir Osmond Esmonde (1896-1936), the 12th baronet, Sir John Esmond (1893-1958) and Sir Anthony Charles Esmond (1899-1981).

Invermore House, standing on a ridge overlooking Courtown Harbour, was designed by the architect Sir Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-1899), and was built in 1859 as a house for M. Scott, the land agent of the Earls of Courtown. The architectural historian Frederick O’Dwyer says Dean ‘was probably Lord Courtown’s architect on other improvements in the village, including the erection of a row of four cottages … and a covered well in the middle of the main street.’

Later in the 19th century and in the early 20th century, the house was the home of the Hon George FW Stopford (1859-1933), a younger son of James GH Stopford (1823-1914), 5th Earl of Courtown, and Lady Mary Lloyd.

After Eva Mary Comerford and her daughter Máire moved out, the house was sold in 1919 behalf of George FW Stopford.

The photograph of Invermore House taken before that sale, just a short time after the Eva and Máire Comerford had lived there. A delightful detail in the photograph is the two young girls waiting at the front door. There is some discussion on social media about their identity.

Although George FW Stopford is not living there in 1911, his daughter Cynthia Mareli Mabel Stopford, who was 11 in 1911, may be one of the girls, and the other girl may be her older cousin Edith (19); or they may be Cynthia in 1916 and her younger cousin Marina Marjorie, also known as Lady Marjorie Gertrude Stopford (1904-1996).

There was another sale of household goods in the house in 1944. The lengthy list of goods being auctioned seems to include everything in the house which could be moved, including beds, cookers, china and golf clubs.

As time moved on, the house changed hands many times. It became an hotel in 1947, and was known by several names over the years, including the Oulart Hotel, the Sands Hotel and the Stopford House Hotel. However, like most hotels in Courtown, it fell on hard times in recent decades, was closed, and was demolished.

All that I could see when I visited in January 2012 was a heap of rubble and a clump of trees in a fenced-off field near two small housing estates. Nothing is left of the stepped arches over the windows, the pyramid-shaped roof, the classical porch, the Gothic entrance arch, the elaborate fretted balusters on the main and secondary staircases with their plant and animal motifs, or the courtyard at the rear with its eclectic design executed in local red brick and the outbuildings with carved bargeboards.

The once-planned apartments were never built on the site, and there are no traces of the forgotten grandeur of a house that once played a minor role in Irish architectural and political history.

The heap of rubble I found in 2012 on the site of Invermore House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Two colourful curates in Tarbert and Ballylongford: 2, Alexander Hanlon, The O’Hanlon

The church ruins in Ballylongford, Co Kerry … the Revd Alexander Hanlon worked in the parish throughout the Great Famine in the 1840s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

I have been the priest-in-charge of the Rathkeale and Kilnaughtin Group of Parishes since January 2017, which includes a large part of North Kerry, from Tarbert and Ballylongford to Ballybunion, to Listowel and Moyvane or Newtownsandes.

Officially, the name of Tarbert parish is Kilnaughtin, recalling the older church to west of Tarbert. So, there is a deeply-embedded sense of history and continuity in ministry here in Saint Brendan’s.

The list of my predecessors in this group of parishes defy the stereotypical images of Church of Ireland clergy. We are not all like the plummy caricatures of ‘the more-tea-vicars’ found on television dramas. The variety of backgrounds of my predecessors shows what a mixture we are, not only in the Church of Ireland, but throughout all society in Ireland. Each one of us is a beautiful part of the mosaic that goes to make up Irish identity, and we need every colour and tincture, every shade and hue, to make that picture complete.

I have already been talking about one of my curious, indeed eccentric, predecessors, the Revd Sir William Augustus Wolseley (1865-1950), who was the curate here for almost 20 years, from 1888 until 1906, and later in life, quite unexpectedly, inherited a family title.

But, perhaps, the most curious title claimed by any of the clergy in this parish was the title of ‘The O’Hanlon,’ an ancient title for the head of a Gaelic Irish clan. It is even more intriguing that this title was claimed by too by one of near-contemporaries, whose time in this diocese almost overlapped. Yet, these two priests seem to have had no close ties of kinship.

The Revd Dr Alexander Patrick Hanlon (1814-1898), who called himself ‘The O’Hanlon,’ was born at Miltown Malbay, Co Clare, the son of Patrick Hanlon, a local Roman Catholic farmer.

Hanlon may have become a member of the Church of Ireland through contact with the Dingle mission, although I am not quite sure about these details. In any case, he would have been seen as a ‘mature student’ when he entered Trinity College Dublin late in 1839 at the age of 23, and graduated BA in 1844. He later studied for ordination and was ordained deacon in 1846 by the Bishop of Killaloe for the Diocese of Ardfert, and priest in 1847.

He was first a curate in 1846-1848 in Murhir, 4.5 miles south of Tarbert, close to border of Co Kerry and Co Limerick, making him one of my predecessors in this parish. The main town today in what was Murhir parish is Moyvane or Newtownsandes. Hanlon seems to have lived in Ballylongford, and today Murhir and Ballylongford are part of the Tarbert group of parishes within the Rathkeale and Kilnaughtin Group of Parishes.

During his time in this parish, he was praised for his ‘unremitting’ and ‘constant’ work with local people in their suffering during the Great Famine in the 1840s and for his ‘genuine charity.’

He freely distributed milk, bread and medicine, working with orphans and the elderly, and it was said: ‘ Not a house in which fever is to be found (and they are the greater in number), but he visits in person.’

Moyvane was at the heart of the Revd Alexander Hanlon’s parish on the Kerry/Limerick border (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

After his time in Ballylongford, Moyvane and Tarbert, Hanlon moved on to parish ministry in Co Meath (1848-1849), Co Tyrone (1849-1851), Mountshannon on the shores of Lough Derg, Co Clare (1851-1871), Co Waterford (1872-1875) and Co Longford (1872-1875).

At one time, it seems, he was considering an appointment back in Co Kerry, in Dingle, during a vacancy in the parish 1864. He was visiting the parish when his wife suffered an epileptic attack while swimming in Dingle Harbour with their young children. She died soon after, and she was buried in Saint James’s churchyard in Dingle.

Hanlon stayed on in Mounshannon in Co Clare for another few years, and he received the degrees LL.B. and LL.D. from Trinity College Dublin in 1865. In a speech in 1867, he defended his work with the Irish Society and the Irish Church Missions, but he was always at pains to deny he had any antagonism towards the Roman Catholic church or his Catholic family, friends and neighbours.

He married a second time in 1871; his second wife Rebecca Parker was from Ballhalmet House, Tallow, Co Waterford. A year later, he moved from Mountshannon to Tallow Parish in west Waterford, and he remained there until he became deputy secretary of the Irish Society in 1879. He was feted at a garden party in Dugort organised by the Achill Mission in 1889.

Hanlon died at Ballyhalmet House, Tallow, Co Waterford, at the age of 84 on 10 December 1898, and was buried inside the ruins of Kilwatermoy Church.

It is curious that his younger, near contemporary, the Revd William Hanlon (1849-1916), who also worked in Church of Ireland ministry in these dioceses, also claimed the title of The O’Hanlon. He was a doctor’s son from Portarlington, and he was ordained deacon in 1874 and priest in 1875.

He came to this diocese, the Diocese of Ardfert and Aghadoe, when he became the Rector of Dromtariffe in 1877. Although Dromtariffe is in Co Cork, halfway between Millstreet and Kanturk, at the time it was in the Church of Ireland Diocese of Ardfert, and in the Catholic church it remains in the Diocese of Kerry.

Hanlon’s father died on 6 July 1890, and a year later, in 1907, Hanlon assumed the title of ‘The O’Hanlon’ by deed registered in the Irish Court of Chancery. Along with the title of ‘The O’Hanlon,’ he also claimed to be chief of the Sept of O’Hanlon and Hereditary Standard Bearer of the King in Ulster.

In the bizarre pedigree he compiled in support of these claims, Hanlon said his lineal ancestor had given Saint Patrick the site in Armagh for his first cathedral.

Hanlon, who was also an honorary chaplain to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, died at Innishannon Rectory on 26 April 1916, two days after the Easter Rising broke out in Dublin.

That is all sounds fantastic. Except, for the minor detail that the last person before either of these two 19th century priests to have been accepted generally as the head of the family was the 17th century rapparee, Redmond O’Hanlon, also known as ‘the Count.’

After the restoration of King Charles II in 1660, Redmond O’Hanlon returned to Ireland and installed himself as clan chief over the old O’Hanlon territories, styling himself ‘the Count.’ He was declared an outlaw in 1674 and became a rapparee around Newry and Carlingford Lough, and was described as being ‘pre-eminent among all the Tories in Ulster.’

Redmond O’Hanlon was killed on the night of 25 April 1681 in the hills in Co Down. His head was severed and was put on display at Downpatrick prison.

After Redmond O’Hanlon’s death, other members of the O’Hanlon family and their circle were hunted down as ‘Tories,’ and his surviving family fled to Co Donegal. Local lore says his son, also Redmond O’Hanlon, exhumed his body, and reburied him in the Church of Ireland churchyard at Conwal Parish in Letterkenny … which is a long way from Ballylongford and Moyvane and a long way from Portarlington.

Buildings of the former Achill Mission in Dugort … Alexander Hanlon was feted by the Achill Mission at a tea party in Dugort in 1889 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

These notes were prepared to accompany the second of two stories recorded at Saint Brendan’s Church, Kilnaughtin (Tarbert), Co Kerry, as part of ‘Poetry With Paddy, Summertime on the Steeple Road’: