While we often express a keen interest in our country's history, in Ireland we rarely move beyond paying token lip service to its material manifestations. At present, there is almost no better example of this dichotomy between what is said and what is done than the work being undertaken at Carton, near Maynooth, Co Kildare. Carton is a great estate of some 1,000 acres at the centre of which lies one of Ireland's finest houses. In the previous century, a frequently advanced explanation for the neglect or mistreatment of such properties was that they had originally been constructed by outsiders and were, therefore, symbols of a shameful past. This is not the case with Carton. For hundreds of years it belonged to an Irish family, the Fitzgeralds, who had first acquired the land on which the house and estate were developed in 1176. The Fitzgerald family has been intimately associated with Irish history thanks to such members as "Silken Thomas" the 10th Earl of Kildare, executed in London in 1537 for leading a rebellion against the English, and his descendant William, second Duke of Leinster, who was one of the most vocal opponents in Ireland to the 1800 Act of Union. And, of course, there was the Duke's younger brother, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, one of the leaders of the United Irishmen who died in prison after the failure of the 1798 rising. It is indicative of the regard in which this patriot has been held that his exquisite former Co Dublin residence, Frascati House, Blackrock, after suffering many years of deliberate neglect, was eventually demolished in November, 1983, to make way for a singularly ugly shopping centre.
Now Carton, in which Lord Edward Fitzgerald was born, is undergoing a transformation which will leave the house and parkland looking quite unlike its former self. The primary responsibility for this loss to the country lies with the State itself which, on a number of occasions, had an opportunity to purchase Carton but chose not to do so. Instead, last year, the State spent £23 million on the acquisition of Farmleigh, a 19th-century property of no architectural distinction or importance to Irish history on the edge of Dublin's Phoenix Park. Since then, more money has been lavished on the still-incomplete refurbishment of Farmleigh, while an irreversible alteration to the fabric of Carton has got under way. Aside from its symbolic importance as the birthplace of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, there are many reasons Carton is so special. Surrounded by almost five miles of boundary walls, until now it has remained one of the only intact demesnes in Ireland. Inside those walls was planted a parkland which, again until very recently, had been preserved for some two and a half centuries. That parkland was the creation of Lord Edward's parents, James, the first Duke of Leinster, and his remarkable wife, Emily. Although they had hoped to persuade the pre-eminent English landscape gardener of the mid-18th century, Capability Brown, to come to Ireland, when he failed to respond to their blandishments, the Leinsters simply designed their own park. In addition to the Rye being widened to create a series of islands, a boathouse was constructed and in 1766, Carton's extraordinary shell cottage was decorated by the duchess. Around 1770, the artist Thomas Roberts painted a series of views of the Carton parkland showing the changes which had been made. The Leinsters spent an inordinate amount of money on the estate, although their efforts could only be fully appreciated by later generations after the trees and other planting had reached maturity. Meanwhile, they carried out extensive work on the house, where the first architect employed had been Richard Castle, also responsible for the design of the family's Dublin residence, Leinster House, now occupied by the Dail. At Carton, the interior had already received attention from the Lafranchini brothers who, in 1739, had covered the saloon's ceiling with elaborate stucco work representing "The Courtship of the Gods".
In the late 1750s, Emily Leinster created the extant Chinese Room in Carton, its walls decorated with panels of chinoiserie paper and elaborate giltwood embellishments. More work on both the house and grounds took place during the first decades of the 19th century when the third Duke and his wife changed the front of the building from south to north, laid out formal gardens before the former space and transformed a section of the Rye into an enormous lake. Every stage of Carton's development is extraordinarily well-documented, yet another characteristic setting this estate apart from almost any other in Ireland. Thanks to the work of successive Fitzgerald generations, Carton had matured into a place of quite exceptional beauty in which an understanding and appreciation of landscape and design had been permitted to take precedence over all other concerns. While the demesne has needed some attention in recent years, its renovation could have been easily accomplished, since so much information about its original appearance was available. Instead, large sections of the estate are now being fundamentally altered as part of Carton's conversion into a luxury leisure resort. In 1977, the house and demesne were bought by a company called Powerscreen, owned by the Mallaghan family. In 1992, the Mallaghans were granted a 10-year planning permission to convert the estate into a golf and country club and intended to undertake this work in conjunction with the Guinness-owned Gleneagles group. When that scheme failed to materialise, new partners were found; Carton's transformation into a leisure resort is being undertaken by a group including the Mallaghans, Starwood Hotels Resorts Worldwide and some private investors. The £50 million project will totally alter Carton, as the park must now accommodate two 18-hole golf courses and new buildings, including a 140-bedroom hotel, 26 "corporate conference units", 26 large demesne houses and 115 "golf villas".
Work is being carried out on the main house, with restoration of the ground floor reception rooms and the installation of 12 luxury suites upstairs and a theme bar in the basement. It has been repeatedly argued in the past that only a large-scale commercial exploitation of the estate such as that now being undertaken could lead to the preservation of Carton House. In October, for example, Conor Mallaghan declared that the present scheme's mission was "to bring Carton back to life and this is the only way to do so". This statement is true - provided the work now being undertaken on the estate is regarded as an exercise in the recuperation of a very substantial investment. But that truth demands a fundamental misunderstanding of Carton's character, its original creation and the nature of the demesne's design. The house and grounds are not, and never were, two separate entities; they were created as a single unit and each is dependent upon the other. To alter completely the parkland is to critically damage the house.
The group responsible for the present work has made much of the fact that there will be "protected vistas" of 70 and 20 acres to the front and rear of the main house. This is the equivalent of salvaging a property's facade while demolishing everything behind it; the eye may be deceived temporarily but will soon realise the falsity of what is being presented. Carton House can only be properly understood and appreciated within its context, not as a decorative feature between two golf courses and surrounded by a large number of other buildings. Similarly, the parkland always required a large house as its centre-piece. Together, they formed a complete work of art; viewed in isolation, each was incomplete. Moreover, Carton House and demesne are exceptional; no other similar creation, with such close historical associations, exists in Ireland. Therefore, it is justified to argue that the work being carried out at Carton is a national loss. Some consolation for the destruction of the original Carton demesne might be found in the thought that such a scheme had not received official approval. However, in response to a question on the estate's future tabled two and a half years ago in the Dail by Emmet Stagg, the Minister for Heritage, Sile de Valera, declared that she considered the creation of a resort property on the site "to be a fitting use for Carton House and demesne and most probably the best means of securing its future". The best means for securing Carton's future would have been for the State to buy and preserve it as a perfect example of 18th-century Irish design, to be enjoyed by all citizens. In its next, and imminent, incarnation, the demesne will no more be enjoyed by the population of this country than when it was a private home. Work has been proceeding for the past year on Carton and will continue for some time to come; by the time it is eventually concluded, little of the Fitzgeralds' imaginative design will remain. At the time of the Troubles, a group of men arrived at the doors of Carton House and announced their intention to burn down the place. Hearing this, one of the members of the family then in the house went to the diningroom and took down a portrait of Lord Edward Fitzgerald which he showed to the men outside. They crossed themselves and left the property untouched. It is, and will be, a matter of great shame to Ireland that similar respect to Carton has not now been shown.