The ongoing fascination with the Irish country house can be seen in the abundance of colourful books dedicated to this subject which continue to appear. Terence Dooley's work is somewhat different to the others, less glossy in appearance, more substantial in content.
It deserves the same attention as Mark Bence-Jones's Twilight of the Ascendancy (1987), being every bit as entertaining even though a great deal less dependent on colourful anecdote. Instead, Dooley has undertaken an extraordinary amount of scrupulous study - everything from a daily analysis of this newspaper for the first years of the 1920s in pursuit of information on the burning of houses to an examination of rental income on a number of substantial estates in different parts of the country.
The result is a very detailed survey of life in Irish country houses over an 80-year period during which they and their owners moved from what seemed to be an established place in the countryside to the role of unloved outcast. That the latter position was inevitable soon becomes clear and helps to explain why these properties were - and in too many cases still are - left to fall into ruin.
Dooley correctly begins by looking at the epithet "big house", a peculiarly Irish term which perfectly locates such a building in the splendid isolation it usually occupied, surrounded by the modest, single-storey dwellings of the local peasant tenantry. The landlord's home was always far grander than that of anyone else and therefore set him apart. Comments made by some owners whose houses were burnt or destroyed during the War of Independence or the Civil War are intensely poignant but reveal a remarkable degree of self-delusion. "I thought they were my friends," remarked the wife of one landlord after the couple had been driven out of their house and could then find no welcome in the local village. As George Bermingham wrote in 1909, for the landowning class, despite long residence, Ireland remained "a strange country, a place of sojourn only, where the people are strange". Unfortunately, as he went on to remark, they could not take comfort in being English; following partition, Somerset Saunderson of Castle Saunderson remarked, "Now I have no country."
Owners of big houses may have thought of themselves as Irish, but this was not a notion shared by the great majority of the population who regarded such people as interlopers, no matter how long they had lived in Ireland.
Among the wealth of statistical information presented by Dooley are details of the 1911 census including the number of servants employed by landlords. He has discovered that the majority of Protestant households tended to hire only Protestant staff and these were usually hired from outside the immediate neighbourhood; in 19th-century Dublin a number of organisations such as the Protestant Registration Office and the Protestant Servants' Registration Office were set up to meet big house employers' requirements.
Local people therefore had little contact with the residents of large country properties, except when the time came to pay rents. And once the Land League began to gain widespread support in the 1880s, any bond which might have existed between landlord and tenant was irrevocably damaged.
Dooley shows how, even without the envious hostility of the surrounding populace, big houses would have failed to survive once successive Land Acts were passed by the British and Free State governments. This legislation removed the enormous acreage that country house owners needed to sustain their homes. In many instances, the estates were already heavily mortgaged and the compensatory monies received were spent paying off these debts. But even when funds were retained by former landlords, they tended to be placed in investments that suffered from the worldwide economic depression of the late 1920s and 1930s; Dooley shows that many houses were abandoned during this period rather than earlier.
This information goes far to contradict the myth that enormous numbers of houses suffered arson attacks in the post-first World War period; in fact, the total was only in the region of 300, even though these included some of the most beautiful old houses such as Summerhill in Co Meath and Desart Court in Co Kilkenny.
Far more buildings were subsequently demolished or left to fall down. In 1946, for example, Hazlewood in Co Sligo was offered for sale by the Land Commission with a stipulation that the purchaser had to demolish the house. Four years later, Lady Edith Windham announced she would have to knock down Dartrey in Co Monaghan because the rates were too high and no buyer could be found for the house; it was duly demolished and the residue realised less than 10 per cent of what it had cost to build Dartrey just over a century earlier.
When hostility faded, indifference took its place. Even when important houses were given to the State, they were left to fall into a condition of near-dereliction; more than 30 years passed before Muckross, bequeathed to the Republic by Arthur Vincent, was given any attention by the government.
Even the big house's potential as a tourist attraction seems not to have stimulated much interest. By the 1980s, the Irish country house had come to look like an anachronism which would soon disappear altogether, its absence barely noticed by most Irish people.
This has not proved to be the case; while a handful of such buildings were restored during the last decade as private homes for newly-enriched Irish citizens, of late a lot of big houses have been "saved" by their transformation into ancillaries of golf clubs.
Dooley closes his book by observing this latest transformation but, strangely, he does not comment that once more the Irish big house has become closed to all but the privileged few.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist and author