Carrickmacross, where I grew up, is not “all to one side like the town of Fermoy”. Architecturally, at least, its main street is as symmetrical as most. Historically and socially, however, it is somewhat lopsided.
The results may not be visible to the naked eye. But a casual traveller, passing through on the way to Derry or Donegal, might notice that all the pubs are on one side – the eastern.
There are a lot fewer of those than there used to be, but signs still suggest about 10 (two or three of which have closed in recent years).
Over on the western front, meanwhile, sobriety rules. The only drinking establishment there now is discreetly contained within the street’s only hotel, the Shirley Arms, on which name hangs a tale.
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I’m told that in Maynooth a similar imbalance of pubs historically arose from the presence of a convent on one side and the reluctance of judges to award licences to places the nuns would have to walk past.
That doesn’t explain the Carrickmacross dichotomy, where the St Louis Convent was at the top of the town but on the eastern side.
The nuns (now all departed), when walking their boarders two by two down Main Street, used to have pass many dens of iniquity, including those frequented by a boisterous Patrick Kavanagh, whose smiling features now look down from a giant mural on one of the corners.
Carrick’s lopsided pub distribution seems to be an indirect effect of a deeper division that forms the subject of a new book, The Wrong Side of the Street by Pat Byrne.
This details an epic legal case in which traders on the western side have sought to buy out the ground rents to their businesses, which in most cases – unlike the eastern side – are still owned by the Shirley estate, once landlords to much of south Monaghan.
As Prof Terry Dooley writes in a foreword to Byrne’s book, the origins of this anomaly go back to 1576 when Queen Elizabeth I granted the barony of Farney to one Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex.
The second Earl of Essex was to lose his head in the Tower of London, courtesy of the same queen, for a series of events that began when he shirked a battle with Hugh O’Neill just south of what is now Carrick in 1599. But the third earl built a castle in Farney, around which the town grew up.
When he died, the land devolved to his sisters and, via marriage, to the Shirleys and the Marquess of Bath, who each inherited 23,000 acres: two fiefdoms divided by Carrick’s main thoroughfare.
The Baths were always absentee landlords. The Shirleys built a neo-Gothic big house outside town in the 1820s and from then on were at least seasonal residents.
After the 1885 Land Act, the Marquess of Bath sold out and ended all association with Monaghan. Not so the Shirleys, who, although their estate is now a fraction of what it once was, retain ownership of the ground rent for Carrick’s western side, and (now fully ensconced locally) are not for letting go.
The issue was dormant for decades, because rents set in a time when inflation was not a factor had become negligible. Alas for latter-day tenants, many were on 99-year leases. As those came up for review from the 1990s on, a legal battle for Carrick’s western front ensued. It continues today.
The lack of pubs apart – although the two things may not be unconnected – that side of Main Street was traditionally the Protestant one. Many of the businesses there were operated by Church of Ireland families.
One of those, Keegan’s newsagents, used to be a base from which me and my fellow teenagers would hang around after school to lay siege on the latter-day occupants of Essex Castle, the St Louis girls, in hopes of liberating them from the nuns’ moral oppression.
But religion does not confer advantages on the rent issue. Philip Keegan, the fourth generation of his family to run the shop, paid his father £175,000 for the remainder of a lease set in the middle of last century at £30 a week, but is quoted saying: “…there’d be no way that I’ll be handing it on to my children with 21 years to go”.
Speaking of Protestants, not the least fascinating detail in Byrne’s meticulously researched work (available locally and from books.ie), is one about how the town might once have taken on a very different look.
In 1693, a certain Baron Luttichau sought to lease a few thousand acres around Carrick to settle 200 Protestant families from Silesia, central Europe. The Bath Estate agreed until it emerged that he planned to demolish the town “and rebuild it in the Polish manner”.
Three centuries later, ironically, many Polish and Lithuanian migrants did come to Carrickmacross for a better life. Effects on local architecture have been minimal, although among the businesses on the western side these days is a branch of the Lituanica supermarket chain.
