Last November, the Connacht Tribune reported there had been no expressions of interest in acquiring Garbally Court, a large early 19th century house on the outskirts of Ballinasloe, County Galway, even though it was being offered for just €1. More than two years earlier, the building’s present owner – the Roman Catholic Diocese of Clonfert – had offered to transfer Garbally Court along with some of the surrounding grounds to the authority for that nominal sum of a single euro. However, a commissioned Consultants’ Report had suggested expenditure of some €4.2 million would be needed just to stabilise the house and bring it up to a reasonable standard. While elected representatives of the area were keen for the acquisition to go ahead, in the hope that Garbally Court could be turned into a tourist attraction, thereby bringing business into the area, the County Council Executive’s advice to the group which needed to approve such matters prior to a full council meeting was that upgrading costs were prohibitive, even before running costs and possible future uses were taken into account. In November, the council’s director of services was quoted as advising councillors that the building ‘is not in our ownership and nor are we willing to take possession but the door is always open for anyone to come in and renovate the property for whatever purpose. But so far, nobody has come next nor near us.’
Garbally Court was built for Richard Le Poer Trench, second Earl of Clancarty. The Trenches claim descent from Frederic de La Tranche, his name supposedly derived from the family’s origins in the town of La Tranche in Poitou. Monsieur de La Tranche is believed to have left France as a result of religious persecution and settled in Northumberland in 1574. One of his sons, James Trench, a clergyman, settled in Ireland, becoming rector of Clongell, County Meath. His only child, Anna, married her first cousin Frederick Trench; it appears that he was responsible for initially buying the land in East Galway that formed the basis of the Garbally estate. The couple’s son, another Frederick, continued to acquire more land, especially in the aftermath of the Williamite Wars. In the next generation. Richard Trench married an heiress, Frances Power, in 1732; she brought further wealth and property to the family. Their eldest son, William Trench sat in the Irish House of Commons like his father before him, before being created first Baron Kilconnel (1797), then Viscount Dunlo (1801) and finally Earl of Clancarty (1803). He and his wife Anne Gardiner had no less than 19 children, their eldest son Richard succeeding to the titles and estates on his father’s death in 1805. The second earl was a politician and diplomat of considerable ability. After sitting in the Irish House of Commons until the dissolution of the Irish Parliament in 1800, and then in the English House of Commons until he became a member of the peerage, after which he sat at Westminster as an Irish representative peer. Close friendship with Castlereagh meant that after the latter became foreign secretary in 1812, the earl was entrusted with a succession of crucial diplomatic missions, attending the Congress of Vienna with the rank of plenipotentiary. He served twice as Britain’s ambassador to the Netherlands, that country’s king making him Marquis of Heusden in 1818; following his retirement as ambassador, he was also created Viscount Clancarty in the English peerage in 1823. But thereafter, and following Castlereagh’s death, he largely withdrew from political life and turned his attention to life in County Galway, where work was well underway on building Garbally Court.
As mentioned, the present Garbally Court dates from the early 19th century. Its predecessor on the site had been badly damaged by fire in 1798, but it would be more than 20 years before work on a new house began. In 1819 the second earl commissioned designs from English architect Thomas Cundy, best-known for acting as surveyor of the Grosvenor family’s London estates and being involved in the initial development of Belgravia in the years prior to his death in 1825. Garbally Court is Cundy’s only work in Ireland, although he did design a number of lodges in various architectural styles for Coolmore, County Cork (see Trans-Atlantic Links « The Irish Aesthete) none of which were actually built. The architect, like others at the time, produced work in whatever style best suited his client. Hawarden Castle in Wales, for example, is – as its name indicates – in the Gothic manner, but Garbally Court is austerely neoclassical. Square in plan, the house is of two storeys and eleven bays, the entrance front relieved by a single-storey Doric porte-cochère, while the rear elevation has a single storey, three-bay bow. Regular and segmental pediments alternate over the ground floor windows. Originally the house was constructed around a central open courtyard but this was later covered and made into a picture gallery. The earl’s descendants continued to own Garbally Court until 1921 when, along with the surrounding demesne, it was sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Clonfert for £6,750. The following year the diocesan boys’ school, St. Joseph’s College, moved to the site and constructed classrooms and other ancillary buildings close to the house. A boarding school was run here until 2008 when it closed down and since then a new school has also been built, hence the need to find fresh purpose – and a new owner – for Garbally Court. What both might look like remains to be seen.
