A Kerry courthouse that transformed Irish history awaits a verdict on its future

By Anna Zacharias, The Kerryman

In the late 1970s, the boys of Tralee made the courthouse steps their playground. Marc Caball remembers sprinting between imposing Russian canons and towering ionic columns built in the 1830s, waiting for Cub Scout meetings to begin across the street.

For the future historian, games between imperial canons were an early history lesson.

“It’s a wonderfully resonate building that inhabits my imagination,” said Mr Caball, an associate professor at University College Dublin who specializes in the culture of early modern Ireland. “It’s not just the history of Kerry but of Ireland.”

For nearly two centuries, the Tralee courthouse has witnessed County Kerry’s fortunes. For half a century, politicians have debated a solution to the dilemma of the cramped Ashe Street edifice: to renovate or relocate?

The question appeared resolved in 2022. The Courts Service purchased half an acre from the County Council for €160,000 to build a courthouse complex on the Island of Geese. Many opposed the proposal, concerned for the heritage building and its Ashe Street neighbourhood. For some, hope rekindled when An Post announced plans to sell a sorting centre site behind the courthouse, giving space for expansion. The postal facility moved on August 25 and now this property will determine the courthouse’s future.

“If it disappears, it disappears from the collective memory,” said Mr Caball. “Having it in your face, day to day, that’s the most effective way of keeping a collective memory of history. This is your history, this is your town. This building is important because it tells you so much.”

Minister of State Dick Spring opens the Tralee courthouse after renovation in 1981. Kerryman archives.

In the early 1800s, Tralee was transformed. The quiet country town became an export centre for butter during the Industrial Revolution and Tralee’s population boomed from about 7,000 in 1800 to 10,000 by the 1830s.

The dilapidated Tralee Castle was demolished in the early 1820s to make space for Denny Street and its grand Georgian townhouses. Construction on a new canal connecting Tralee to the Atlantic was underway by 1832 and the Georgian boulevard of Day Place had opened in the early 1800s.

“Tralee is this town that’s bustling, that’s thriving in the 1820s and 1830s, and the courthouse reflects that sense of commercial and cultural confidence,” said Mr Caball. “It’s a moment of great prosperity in Tralee’s history.”

Ashe Street, then called Nelson Street, was the town centre and Tralee’s elite sought a courthouse to suit its status. They appointed a young Irish architect, William Vitruvius Morrison, who took inspiration from his tours of Italy, France and England. He designed a £14,000 neoclassical building that was considered modern, spacious and fashionable.

It became the envy of Ireland and set the standard for Irish courthouses, with a replica soon built in Carlow.

A priests blesses the courthouse upon its reopening in 1981. Kerryman archive.

It was Tralee’s third courthouse, replacing one on Castle Street from the 1770s. Twice a year, judges arrived from Dublin and people travelled across Kerry to attend court. For the elite, it was an event.

“They flooded Tralee,” said Mr Caball. “It’s not just about hearing legal cases and sorting legal issues, it’s also about coming together and having a good time, taking the spa waters and spending the night in the assembly rooms on Castle Street, meeting your friends.”

Completed in August 1833, it had semi-circular courtrooms for criminal and civil cases, with an administrative block for grand juries, the county council’s predecessor. It was a social hub, as was usual for Ireland’s courthouses.

“Grand juries would have dined and entertained in them, so there would have been balls in the courthouses,” said Colum O’Riordan, the director of the Irish Architectural Archive and editor of the anthology Ireland’s Court Houses. “They would have been a real centre in the town, not just of judicial life and political life but social life as well. Tralee was no exception to that.”

The courts had Irish language interpreters into the 1840s, indicating many on trial or giving testimony could only speak Irish.

The Tralee courthouse open its re-opening in 1981. Kerryman archives.

For ordinary folk, the courthouse was an austere assertion of authority by the Anglo-Irish establishment.

Its steps were later flanked by two canons captured by British forces in the Crimean War of 1853-56, trophies distributed by the British War Department across its empire. Etched into stone platforms are the names of Kerrymen killed for British imperial forces in Crimea and the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Colonial symbolism likely fostered antipathy to renovation during the twentieth century but Tralee Courthouse has served the Republic for more than a century, noted Mr O’Riordan.

Additionally, it was built with Kerry money by Irish speakers, including skilled joiners and masons, using stone quarried from what is now the town park.

“I don’t see it as imperial or colonial, I see it as an embodiment of Kerry society in its time, in all its complexity,” said Mr Caball.

Indeed, one of the early lawyers to grace its halls was Daniel O’Connell, who was at the height of his influence having secured Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

Other changes loomed. In the late 1800s, Austin Stack began his legal career at age 14 as a clerk across the street. He would establish the Dail Courts in 1920, a republican court that ran parallel and in opposition to the British judicial system during the War of Independence. In the interim, he was likely one of several republican activists tried at Tralee Courthouse.

Con Casey, a former editor of The Kerryman reared on Nelson Street, recalled gawping at the pageantry of Assize High Court judges arriving on horse-drawn coaches and watching trumpets blast to proclaim George the Fifth King of Great Britain and the British empire in 1910. Mr Casey returned to his boyhood haunt as a court reporter for The Kerryman under the Irish Free State.

Councillors discuss renovations of the Tralee courthouse in 1981. Kerryman archives.

By time a young Caball played on courthouse steps in the late 1970s, it was derelict after more than a decade of abandonment. A patch of dry rot in a doorframe had spread through the building, locking the Kerry County Council and Department of Justice in dispute. The former owned the building, the latter operated it and neither wanted to pay for repairs. The courthouse reopened in 1981, its interior gutted and restored for half a million pounds.

Even then, The Kerryman reported the refurbished courtroom was too small and its acoustics poor.

Tralee’s predicament is faced across Ireland, where most courthouses date from the early 1800s or late 1700s.

In Tralee’s case, the 1981 gutting gives carte blanche for renovations, said Mr O’Riordan. “All of its problems are solvable. Love what you’ve got.”

He points to the €14 million courthouse renovation at Mullingar in 2018, which added three courtrooms and an additional floor to the 1828 structure. It was one of seven historic courthouses upgraded through a €140 to €150 million project.

The proclaimation of George V as King of Britain and its colonies outside Tralee courthouse in 1910. Kerryman archives.

These heritage buildings give a place its individual form and identity, notes Judith Hill, an architectural historian based in Limerick.

“From the perspective of inhabitants, it gives a sense of continuity,” she said. “If there’s a historic building, we’ve still got a witness to things that happened in the past. The people who live there have memories attached.”

Additionally, she noted, courthouses have always adapted as judicial systems and architectural norms transform. Take, for instance, the provision of toilets.

For Mr Caball, the courthouse is an intrinsic part of Tralee history.

“The building, the streets, the people, that’s what makes a town,” he said. “Buildings without people are meaningless. The courthouse must have a defined function going forward. It’s a building of national significance.