The last of Ireland’s thatched churches

Mainly About Books

by the Books Editor

Only part of my week is spent working on these pages for The Irish Catholic. Other days are spent on research for other projects. Recently in the course of these, I lighted upon an article in now The Standard from 1936, the headline of which spoke of “the last of the Penal thatched churches”.

The historian and archaeologist who lurks constantly at the back of my mind reacted immediately. Mass rocks are a topic of great interest in many places; but the local churches that followed them get little or no attention.

The story (which was part of a series on churches and church building) concerned a parish church at Camus, now in Rosmuck parish, in Connemara, which had lasted as a thatched chapel down to the mid-1890s before being replaced with a new church, which today is now without a resident priest.

In penal times Catholic chapels were outlawed. After the Jacobite threat waned after ‘15 and ‘45, they began to be built openly, but under regulation. Even then they could not be built on main streets, and have a clear appearance: they were down side streets and often had houses standing in front of them. Hence ‘Chapel Lane’ and ‘Church Street’ place names in so many town – the church being the established Church of Ireland.

Poverty

Certainly it was poverty and remoteness that kept the chapels in many places thatched for so long — slates had to be imported from North Wales. However, another issue of the paper mentioned that the description of the Galway church was close to that given by the Freeman’s Journal of the chapel at Sneem, down in Kerry.

That too had been a small thatched bleak little building. However, Edwin, 3rd Lord Dunraven, who had converted to Catholicism in 1855, had bought Garnish Island nearby and was busy with the garden and the villa there.

He attended Mass at Sneen. It struck him one day that there he was making himself and his estate as comfortable as could be for a gentleman. But here was the impoverished chapel of his tenants.

To get the job done quickly he paid for it himself. He engaged a builder, a local man name Murphy, who set to work with purpose . Mr Murphy died soon after, and was replaced in the contract with his son, none other than the famous (or is it still infamous) William Martin Murphy, the politician, developer, newspaper owner and leader of the employers in the 1913 ‘Lock-Out’. The thatched chapel of Sneem was soon no more. The new church was opened in 1867.

However, it seems that the thatched chapel at Camus was deemed to be the very last in the country. This may well be true for there had been waves of church building in Ireland, in the town in the 18th Century, and again after the Famine in the 1860s onwards, millions then being spent by the Church all across the country. Those who had emigrated were now called upon and bravely responded to an appeal to provide funds. Few, if any, in Camus were people of means like Lord Dunraven. But across the country such people as Daniel O’Connell in Dublin and Kerry provided a measure of lay national leadership in the matter.

These thatched chapels belonged to a neglected aspect of Irish parish history, for they must have been commonplace in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Indeed, they represent what many small local chapels looked like in the long centuries since St Patrick.

Famine

After the Famine, the Catholic Church spent widely on church building, hence many churches survive from the 1860s or so. No one seemed to remark on the immense sums involved for a still distressed country. The generation of prosperous cattle farmers who had done well out of the Famine were much less ready to speak of it back in mid-century as a national disaster. Indeed it was not until the end of the century that the Famine began to be used as a symbol in nationalist propaganda.

A great deal of history is certainly bound up in the fading memories of Ireland’s thatched chapels of ‘the olden days’.