One curious inversion of reality in Irish life is the view that the inhabitant of the Big House is somehow to be envied. Rubbish. If I heard that I'd inherited such a property, I'd promptly go out and buy a box of matches and a can of paraffin.
Big Houses are hell. Proof of that is that virtually without exception, somewhere within all those draughts, there is the equivalent of a Rathfarnham semi-detached, a little living area which precisely replicates a suburban home's dimensions and character.
The Big House burns money. It leaks. It is freezing. Most of all, the Big House is lonely: for when you stand at your front door beneath your leaking gutters you see no people, only hundreds of trees requiring a tree surgeon, and a mile of drive in need of re-laying.
Perhaps Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth, ninth baronet, often felt like that as he peered out of Lissadell during his few gallant years in the house. There is no point in calling him Anglo-Irish. He was English, and it is enormously to his credit that he returned to the family home after his aunt Aideen died in 1994. But in time, he proved unequal to the struggle - and who can blame him? What friendships, what congenial company are possible when you are an Englishman marooned at the end of a long, dripping driveway in Sligo? And so the link between the family and the house finally ended, as chronicled by Dermot James in his splendid The Gore-Booths of Lissadell, (Woodfield Press), just published. No family has a natural right to live in a particular house for ever, and I feel no emotion whatever that destiny had drawn the two apart: it is the working of that destiny which is so interesting, and which makes Dermot's study a minor classic of the Big House genre.
If you live in the Big House, people will usually believe the worst of you. For example, in the 1830s, Sir Robert Gore-Booth decided to evict some tenants because he felt that their plots were too small: well, he would say that, wouldn't he? But not merely did he compensate them for the acquisition of their land, he also personally chartered a ship, the Pomona, to take them to Canada. It is not an entirely wholesome story - but nor is it a wholly terrible one either.
Though the Pomona completed its journey safely, a rumour soon circulated that it had been lost with all hands, and the rumour has survived to this day. Tim Pat Coogan's and George Morrison's account of the Civil War reports of the Pomona that the "whole shipload of emigrants was drowned within sight of shore." Jacqueline van Voris's biography of Constance Markievicz declared that the vessel had a fiendish captain and a false bottom, and the skipper - rather gallantly to my mind - was so determined to finish off these pesky Irish peasants that he perished in the task. The equally silly Diana Norman maintained that the Pomona was a coffin-ship, which sank with all lives. "Perhaps not surprisingly," she opined darkly, "no evidence for this survives in the family papers." Not surprisingly indeed, for the Pomona continued to ply back and forth across the Atlantic for years to come - which did not prevent local historian Joe McGowan recently printing a ballad about the sinking, while the broken-hearted young people of Sligo watched their loved ones perish.
Of course, the most famous holder of the Gore-Booth name was Constance Markievicz, whose own account of her plucky conduct on being sentenced to death in 1916 has entered Irish nationalist mythology.
Dermot James has retrieved the record of the prosecuting counsel, William Wylie KC, who bizarrely went on to become a High Court judge in the new state. Wylie spoke well of some of the 1916 leaders, admiring their bravery, dignity and demeanour.
But of Markievicz he wrote: "she crumpled up completely, crying. 'I'm only a woman, and you cannot shoot a woman, you must not shoot a woman' . . . she was literally crawling, I won't say any more, it revolts me." Of course, this same woman had no trouble shooting poor unarmed Constable Lahiff dead in St Stephen's Green. Yes, she revolts me too - but not for pleading for her life (an eminently sensible policy, and one I would certainly emulate) but for her triumphalist murderousness ("I shot him, I shot him," she gleefully screamed beside Lahiff's body) and her insufferable vanity.
It wasn't the Gore-Booth status as Protestant gentry which was their undoing, but a combination of Hitler, Churchill and unbelievably bad luck. In the next generation of Gore-Booths, Brian, a sub-lieutenant in the British navy, was killed when his destroyer, HMS Exmouth, was torpedoed in January 1940.
Churchill's military lunacies were so numerous and so abominable that the calamity at Leros three years later cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered his most infamous - but it's up there, nonetheless.
He ordered the British army to invade the Greek island, without air-cover, and the entire task force, including a battalion of Royal Irish Fusiliers, was either killed or captured in a German counter-attack. Amongst the dead was Captain Hugh Gore-Booth.
Meanwhile Michael, first-born and heir, had become gravely mentally ill, and was made a ward of court. The court's administration of the Lissadell estate - either through dishonesty or ineptitude: what, in this country? - became a national scandal, and inflicted grievous wounds on both the house and the family fortune, from which neither fully recovered.
It is an extraordinary, quite riveting story, and one which has found a quite splendid teller in Dermot James.