The Georgian courthouse rebuilt from Civil War ashes
The KerrymanVincent Carmody hands me three black-and-white photographs as I step through the doorway of his home in Listowel.
“I was up in the attic at 7.30 this morning,” says the local author and retired postman-turned-history buff. “I didn’t think I’d find them but I did.”
The first photograph shows a grand, two-storey Georgian courthouse of broad, tall windows at the end of a dirt road on a winter’s day in the late 1800s or early 1900s.
The second photograph shows the courthouse in 1922, its walls charred. A man in slacks and a buttoned shirt stands in a large, empty window frame on the gutted ground floor.
The third photograph is the Listowel garda station, burnt black. Barefoot children cling to its fence and capped men stand before its gate, surveying the damage.
Since 1843, the Listowel courthouse has served as a battleground, in and out of its courtroom. From an IRA gunbattle to cases about fishing in the Feale, the courthouse has represented empire, a divided state and a republic. It has seen every side of North Kerry history.
Despite its violent past, the courthouse retains its early elegance, with a courtroom of high ceilings, ornate architraves and long sash windows overlooking hills dotted with grazing cows.
Two of Carmody’s photos show Listowel beset by civil war in August, 1922.
On August 2 and 3, some 1,000 Free State Army troops, many from the Dublin Guard and Galway Western Division, arrived by ship in Tarbert. They quickly covered the 19km south to pro-treaty Listowel, set up in the workhouse and at the Listowel Arms Hotel in the square.
Across town, the IRA had already fortified the courthouse with sandbags. When Free State troops arrived, the IRA retreated. On August 3, they burnt the garda station. On August 5, they burnt the courthouse. The Carnegie Library and workhouse were also sacked.
The new government rebuilt the courthouse in the same style in 1927, a priority, says Mr Carmody, for the Irish Free State to ensure people could attend court without an arduous journey to the county capital. Today, its appearance is little changed since the first photograph.
“ ‘Twas an important building, you see,” says Carmody, who is 81. “They wouldn’t want people to be going to court in Tralee, they needed it. If you didn’t rebuild things, you were living back in the Dark Ages.”
Carmody stands above a small table stacked with books in the living room that was once his mother’s kitchen, flipping through tomes and thick binders of his research into crime and characters from the mid-1800s when the courthouse first opened.
It was a variant of the popular Georgian house style of courthouse from the late 1830s and 1840s, replicated across Ireland during a boom of courthouse construction and interpreted by the Kerry County surveyor, Henry Stokes.
After its 1920s reconstruction, it declined until 1998, when a judge ruled it too cold and uncomfortable for use. It re-opened a year later with a blessing from the clergy and a £1m investment that moved the courtroom to the second floor.
It originally replaced a dilapidated timber structure on the same site.
Its courtroom witnessed the hard edges of life in the market town. Soon after its opening, famine fever killed at least one barrister and one Irish interpreter.
Some cases were of their time: the trespass of cattle through a neighbour’s corn, turnips or potatoes, allowing pigs to wander on the public street, and driving cattle through the town or opening a shop on a Sunday.
Others differed little from those in the Listowel District Court today. There were charges for assault, theft, public intoxication and having a cart that did not display the owner’s name, the equivalent of today’s car registration.
Minor misdemeanours were punished locally. Carmody recalls a Dingle pickpocket who served a week in the Listowel Bridewell.
But punishment could be more severe.
Carmody opens a binder with a ship’s log and details about Elizabeth Scalon, a Listowel laundress with black hair, chestnut eyes and a scar on her upper lip.
He collected documents on her life after meeting her great-great-granddaughter, who travelled to Listowel from Australia in September 1992 to better know her ancestry.
Listowel citizens had petitioned Dublin politicians in 1838 for clemency when Miss Scanlon was convicted of stealing blankets from her employer, James Sheehan.
Carmody’s records show she was deported on the Margaret to serve seven years in Australia. She was 24.
Miss Scanlon, who was five-foot-one, suffered a fever from dysentery on the crossing. She died age 38.
With so many similar cases of colonial injustice, it is little wonder the courthouse became a target during the War of Independence.
“It wasn’t just to stop the enemy having that infrastructure, it was a symbolic act as well,” says Dr Richard McElligot, a historian from Kilflynn and professor at Dundalk Institute of Technology. “This building is a symbol of the British courts system and one of the main things the IRA government was trying to do was to set up the Dáil legal courts. It was strategic to stop them having that building, in case they’re able to come back and have a counter-attack.”
One letter from The Military Archives details an attack in July 1920, when men from the Listowel and Finuge Compound IRA cut through fields to capture the building. They were met with fire from the caretaker, who exchanged shots until they withdrew after help arrived from the nearby barracks.
As the century went on, courthouse battles were no longer literal and the stakes lower than colonial liberation or the shape of a new state. Conflict was resolved in the courtroom, through discourse and rhetoric.
By 1962, even the humble salmon had its rights.
Long before Robert Pierse debated constitutional law at the High Court in Dublin, he was a young solicitor at Listowel District Court.
“I was defending a man who was alleged to have snatched salmon out of the river,” Mr Pierse tells me. “I made my name out of it, really. I beat the bailiffs, as they say.”
We are seated at his home office, a two-story rotunda of law books, art and glass windows as Pierse recounts courthouse history and his own mid-century memories.
“At that stage, the District Court was how you got your name out among the people,” says Pierse, who is 88. “It was tiered all along the walls and you had to impress those in the gallery to get further clients.”
In those days, salmon fishing in the Feale carried a two pound, three guinea fine, a penalty most happily paid in advance.
His defence? There was no evidence of a hook on the line.
The judge agreed, awarded his client three guineas for legal costs, dismissed the charge and all similar charges that day.
“And, of course, my name went far and wide,” says Mr Pierse.
“We then raised the point that the bailiff had not proved that there was either salmon or trout in the river.”
The judge agreed and awarded his client ten guineas for legal costs.
“We thought we were millionaires,” says Mr Pierse. “I made 37 pounds in my first year.”
It was an age where judges applied a shrewd understanding of human nature, says Pierse.
He recalls a client who had won the Victoria Cross for bravery in World War One. Upon the soldier’s return, he fell into regular trouble from drinking, jeopardising his award and pension.
The judge, a veteran himself, was sympathetic.
“The judge would say, ‘I’ll give you one last chance.’ And he gave him about forty last chances.”