A first look inside Tralee’s historic Kerry Protestant Hall
The Kerryman“I’d make a terrible robber, anyway,” says Clodagh Moynihan, trying three keys against three locks on the heavy wooden door.
“Those doors must be sticky,” says a passerby. “Give a good shunt.”
In the last twenty years, the doors to one of Kerry’s landmark buildings have scarcely been opened.
We step inside the Kerry Protestant Hall, the Victorian limestone building opposite Tralee Courthouse, locally known as the KPH.
Moynihan has let me in for John Cashell, the Listowel solicitor who recently bought the building for restoration as a solicitor’s office.
“Isn’t it fabulous?” she says, her voice echoing.
Lost elegance is evident: three-and-a-half metre high ceilings, hardwood floors covered in thick dust, Victorian wallpaper. Brambles poke through large kitchen windows, obscuring the clear morning light. There are few clues of previous occupants, human or otherwise, apart from a collection of pennies on the kitchen counter and a flurry of feathers on the second floor.
In the silence, it is hard to imagine the hall a century earlier, when it was the scene of raucus badminton matches, Shakespearean lectures and roller skating parties.
The Church of Ireland shut its wooden doors after 140 years with a farewell party in October 2003 when upkeep became too expensive. The church moved its administrative offices and recreational games to its premises up Ashe Street.
The Kerryman’s columnist Seamus McConville attended the October 4 goodbye, writing about a “pair of forlorn shuttlecocks” marooned in the rafters, the relicts, he wrote, to the badminton games played in the hall at least as far back as 1919. The hall was established as an essential space in Tralee’s social scene 50 years earlier and would remain so, with a badminton club (formed in 1926), dances and all manners of sports and children’s classes throughout the twentieth century.
For Marc Caball, an associate professor of history at University College Dublin, the hall was “a childhood adventure”.
He was under the guidance of Sue Latchford alongside boys from Ballymacelligot. “That doesn’t sound very exotic but it was, to me, in the 1970s. It was a window into another culture.”
“It was a magical place when you’re a child,” says Caball, who specalises in the history of early modern Ireland. “But the Kerry Protestant Hall has this larger history. Conjures up a Victorian world, doesn’t it? It’s a Protestant space in a largely Catholic town. It’s a chapter in Tralee’s cultural history.”
The hall had beguiled generations of children before him, opening in 1863 and built by Tralee’s Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist communities with fossilised shell-flecked stone cut from the old quarry at Castlecountess.
Its architect was James Franklin Fuller, then 28, who would later design and restore Irish landmarks including Kylemore Abbey in Connemara (1884), Ashford Castle in Cong (redesigned in 1875 and 1881) and the Parknasilla Hotel in Sneem (1894).
Fuller, who was born in Derryquin, was “undoubtedly eccentric and inveterately snobbish”, according to the Irish Architectural Archive. He was known for prolific architectural works and melodramatic Victorian novels. But a lifelong insistence on discarding letters and distaste for keeping ledgers or books meant he later fell into obscurity.
The Kerry Protestant Hall was one of his earliest works. Even in the 1860s, it was described as belonging to the Tralee Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Its male organisers and associated rectors were meticulously documented by local press through the years.
But the building also owed its existence to parish women, whose provision of ‘plain and fancy’ needlework, toys, and ornaments helped raise a thousand pounds during a summer bazaar to pay the debt from construction.
Newspaper reports on dances in subsequent years also thanked women for the provision of tea and good company.
This year, a new chapter begins as the buliding joins the long list of solicitors’ offices on and around Ashe Street.
Even at the time of its 2003 closure, McConville recorded rumours it would become an extension of the 1832 courthouse. In 2022, TD Pa Daly continued to champion it as a space for family law, proposing it be developed as part of a courts complex in the buildings surrounding the courthouse.
In 2023, Cllr Sam Locke proposed the hall’s upper floor be used as a municipal art gallery and tabled the motion to the council on behalf of more than 600 signatories.
But still, the building sat vacant, leading to concern about the future of Ashe Street as the Courts Service announced long-term plans to vacate the courthouse in favour of a new complex at the Island of Geese.
Cashell visited the building regularly as a child for taekwondo classes. In recent days, he has peeled back wallpaper to discover old etchings. The brambles will soon be tamed and the building’s rooms will brighten once again.