Evict, convert, and the press fights back
The Partry controversy
Through the 1850s the Church of Ireland archbishop of Tuam, Thomas Plunket, and his sister Catherine ran a campaign of conversion across Partry and neighbouring Tourmakeady. They built schools and pressed tenants to send their children to them, with the threat of eviction for refusing and land and work offered to those who complied. Catherine Plunket was, in the language of the time, a souper. By the time Fr Patrick Lavelle was appointed parish priest of Ballyovey in 1860 something like a hundred tenants had already been put out. The breaking point came that year when the Plunkets evicted 17 families, around 68 people, and levelled their houses. Lavelle took the story to newspapers at home and abroad; the scandal that followed broke the campaign, and the Plunkets withdrew to Tuam. It is one of the clearest cases in Irish history of proselytism, eviction and the printed word colliding in a single small parish.
The priest-hunter who died in the wood
Seán na Sagart
Seán na Sagart, 'John of the priests', was the byname of John Mullowney, the most notorious priest-hunter of the Penal era in Mayo. The story goes that he was caught stealing a horse, faced the rope, and bought his freedom by agreeing to hunt down priests for the authorities for pay. He met his end in 1726 in a wood near Partry, killed by Friar David Bourke, one of the men he was pursuing. He was buried at Ballintubber, a few miles north, where so loathed was his memory that the body was dug up and thrown into Lough Carra before being reinterred in unconsecrated ground facing north, away from the rising sun. An ash tree, said never to have borne fruit, grew over the grave.
The Lynch seat on Lough Carra
Partry House
Partry House was built in 1667 by the Lynch family on the remains of an earlier castle, on a 250-acre estate of farmland, bog and woodland looking out over Lough Carra. It stayed in Lynch hands, the line later styled Lynch-Blosse, until 1991. Two of the sons raised here made names abroad in the 19th century: Henry Blosse Lynch, who as an Indian Navy officer led survey expeditions on the Tigris and Euphrates, and his brother Thomas Kerr Lynch, who ran a steamer service on the Tigris and served as consul-general for Persia in London. The house survives and opens to visitors in the summer months.