During the War of Independence some of the neo-Gothic mansions that adorned the Irish countryside, with their decorative turrets and battlements, were pressed into service as real castles for the first time, commandeered as billets for the thousands of British soldiers and Black and Tans who were pouring into the country.

The earliest house-burnings by the IRA aimed to prevent such uses, but the rebels subsequently began to burn other Big Houses in reprisal for the actions of Crown forces. Over the course of the War of Independence and the Civil War, about one-fifth of Ireland’s 1,500 Big Houses were set on fire.

Blazing mansions present a dramatic picture of an aristocracy under attack but Terence Dooley’s thoroughly researched and accessible new study productively situates this phase of direct violence within a longer trajectory of decline.

Even before the Land Acts of the late 1800s and early 1900s, many landed estates were becoming unviable and the Big Houses – expensive to heat, insulated poorly or not at all and subject to high death duties – were becoming an insupportable burden to some of their occupants. Contemplating a possible IRA burning of Killeen Castle in Co Meath in 1921, Lady Fingall for one could see the advantages of an enforced downsizing: “We should have a smaller comfortable house for two people growing old and their children and their friends… well-fitting windows, no draughts or ghosts, and the bathrooms that I had always dreamed of, with plenty of hot water.”

House-burnings were usually carried out with little or no direct violence against the person, and owners were generally given at least a little time to salvage some possessions. At Moydrum Castle near Athlone, unusually, the IRA commander even allocated several men to help Lady Castelmaine remove valuables before the house was burnt. There were horrors and petty cruelties but they were the exception rather than the rule and some of the Big Houses that were eyed up for destruction were spared through local mediation or the force of argument.

Dooley quotes Lady Fingall’s vivid account of a young man “with some mysterious authority” racing up the long drive to Castletown House near Celbridge on a motorcycle as the petrol was about to be poured “to say that on no account was the house to be touched” because it had been built by William Connolly, the speaker of the Irish House of Commons 200 years previously. It helped, too, if the Big House was a major source of local employment.

Some families reached a modus vivendi with local communities in which the IRA was strong: the owners of Bantry House in west Cork, for example, made the house available for use as a hospital during these years and the building was spared.

Bad will

As Dooley shows, the IRA cited immediate justifications – loyalties to Britain, a recent record of aiding state forces, potential or actual use of the house by Crown forces – but the accumulated bad will attached to the Big Houses made them especially vulnerable.

In the shared narratives of Land Leaguers and Irish nationalists, landed estates were the product of dispossession even if many locals valued the employment and spending they brought. That said, there was substantial variation in the relationship of Big House owners to the British state. More than a few were owned by Home Rulers. And then there were the Big House origins of prominent republicans such as Maud Gonne, Constance Gore-Booth and Treaty negotiator Robert Barton.

Dooley’s central thesis, that land-hunger and friction between landlords and tenants supplied some of the motivation for house burnings, is convincing. Comparative research by scholars such as Stathis Kalyvas – cited to good effect by Dooley – has shown that the motivations of individuals during civil wars and rebellions cannot always be neatly aligned with the propagandist narratives of the main protagonists.

The civil war opened up even more space for private motives to come to the fore. In some cases, large numbers of people took advantage of the weakness of state authority to loot Big Houses such as Glenfarne in Co Leitrim: “From far and near – from Fermanagh, Cavan and Leitrim – the people came with carts and carried away from Glenfarne everything that was portable – the timber, the rails, the whole interior of the house,” a Justice Devitt wrote in 1923.

Private gain was not limited to those who took away crockery, linen or furniture for personal use, or the gardening enthusiasts who dug up ornamental plants and shrubs. Dooley speculates that “there is a hidden history yet to be unveiled of how local respectables – auctioneers, solicitors, bank managers, men of property – sometimes connived to take advantage of the revolutionary period for personal advantage through the sale of Big Houses, their contents and lands, or acquiring them cheaply as private residences…”.

Many members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and gentry died violently in the decade before Britain conceded a measure of independence to Ireland, a large proportion of them the eldest sons and heirs of the Big Houses. The opening chapters of Burning the Big House convey how devastating and demoralising this loss of life was. But almost all of them were killed not during the Troubles but in military service during the Great War.

The house-burnings were a shattering experience. “Such a dreadful year of rebellion and murder – and now England has cast us off and given us to the murderers,” Lady Alice Howard wrote in her diary in December 1921. But the loss of life among the aristocracy during these years paled against that suffered during the first World War.

Terence Dooley’s rich study teases apart the mixture of motives that led to the burning of so many of the Big Houses. It also offers some suggestive directions for future research and conveys a sense of the tangled local relationships that served to doom some houses while protecting others.

But the book goes well beyond this, situating this intense episode of direct violence in the longer-term unfolding in Ireland of two intertwined struggles – over land ownership and political authority – that contributed to the long-term decline and marginalisation of Ireland’s landowning aristocracy and gentry.

Niall Ó Dochartaigh’s latest book, Deniable Contact: Back-Channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland, is shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize.