Cahir, Co. Tipperary

Cahir, often seen as "Caher," is a quaint but historic town embedded within the heart of south-central Ireland.

Throughout its history, the town has both reflected and belied the greater trends of the nation, and in these distinctions it sets itself apart as a fascinating case study. How do a country's greater developments impact everyday towns? How important are smaller, more personal events in making change in places like Cahir?

Here, the collision of the major and the seemingly minor will be explored through the lens of Cahir's unique story.

Above: The  Grubb family  in 1937 and a modern view of  Cahir Castle .

 Samuel Lewis’ 1837 A Topographical History of Ireland  provides great background into the early town. Just under 8,500 people dwelled in greater Cahir in 1837, of which about 3,400 lived in the town proper. Geographically, Cahir’s most striking feature is its position along the Suir River, which carves through the settlement’s heart. Cahir Abbey sat on the west side of the river, with Cahir Castle on the eastern flank; together, they forged a quaint skyline. The town housed a large linen factory and was known for its Italian-style straw production that employed nearly 70 women. Flour was another key product in Cahir, manufactured at five mills. Meanwhile, the town housed cavalry barracks fit for around 370 officers and 300 horses.

Cahir’s leading figure was the Earl of Glengall, who, according to Lewis, lived in  Cahir House  in the town despite historic residence in the now-dilapidated Cahir Castle. Two men by the name of Richard Butler  held the title  in the pre-Famine era. The family home was near the Suir, straddling it with a two-mile demesne  on either side .

Cahir’s leading figure was the Earl of Glengall, who, according to Lewis, lived in  Cahir House  in the town despite historic residence in the now-dilapidated Cahir Castle. Two men by the name of Richard Butler  held the title  in the pre-Famine era. The family home was near the Suir, straddling it with a two-mile demesne  on either side .

The Butlers  traced their lineage  back to James le Botiller, King Henry IV’s lord-deputy of Ireland in the 1400s. His daughter married into Cahir’s landed Butler family, yielding one Thomas Butler who became Baron of Caher in 1543. After a childless death in 1788, the peerage moved to Richard Butler, a cousin living in Glengall who became the "Earl of Glengall."

Cahir hosted  two main landlord families : the Fennells and Grubbs. The latter held 200 acres of land and derived their income from  Richard Grubb’s flour mill  in town. Richard Grubb and his family were Quakers. They  oversaw the construction  of Cahir’s Quaker House in 1834, providing a full-time meeting place for the 121 Quakers in Cahir. George Fennell, eventual lessee of the Grubbs, was also Quaker. His relative, Joseph, hosted religious meetings before the construction of the Quaker House.

The lower classes in the countryside remained mostly Catholic, and something like  a third of Tipperary’s landed families  were Catholic in the 1730s. Contemporary maps of Cahir town illustrate how the Catholic zone of the town had shrunk by 1840. Mill-focused Quaker property dominated the north and west, a historic trend that went undisturbed. Meanwhile, the Catholic center and southeast were replaced by Anglican holdings with the exception of St. Mary’s Catholic church,  constructed in the 1830s . This era of Cahir saw a split between a cordial duopoly of Quaker merchants and the Anglican political class, with a mostly-landless Catholic underclass a tier below.

Taking a broader view, it becomes clear that life for the people of pre-Famine Cahir was innately bound up with religious identity. Catholics were dispossessed of their urban holdings by the time of the Act of Union, and elites with ties to the Church of Ireland consolidated their holdings in a city that was visibly dominated by a landmark symbolic of Ascendancy power: Cahir Castle. The Earl of Glengall was the personal manifestation of this influence, and he took a leading role in Cahir’s affairs. All the while, dissenting Quakers were uniquely important. They formed a powerful business class and half of a duopolistic elite that influenced economic life. For the more than eight thousand Quakers, Anglicans, and Catholics in Cahir, religious identity was paramount.

Much as in the rest of Ireland, Cahir’s outlying rural regions were deeply changed during the decade from 1845 to 1855. The population in these regions, according to information from  University College Cork's database  of demographic data, fell 32% from 5,085 to 3,459 between 1841 and 1851. Some individuals migrated; Catherine Stokes “arrived [in] New York [in] 1836,” only to return “to Ireland at some point” but exit again in 1847 during the Famine. Similar Saving Banks records (1) also record Jane Drysdale Morrissey leaving behind four siblings to migrate to New York in 1849.

Blight challenged existing patterns of economic life. The share of the rural population engaging in agriculture fell from 87% to 62%, showing how potatoes could no longer support the farming system. Labor shifted towards manufacturing; a 10% share of the rural population transitioned into industry by 1851, influenced by the surprising success of Cahir proper. The urban population of the town actually increased between 1841 and 1851 from 3,496 to 3,668. Meanwhile, urban manufacturing became more common, with 50% of the working population involved in it.

Quakers of the day were keenly aware of the ills of the Irish socio-political system and the overreliance on the potato crop. This knowledge likely motivated political activity amongst Cahir’s Grubb and Fennell Quaker families. George Fennell appears in a story  from the Nenagh Guardian  on October 30, 1950 about leadership in emergency meetings. Richard Grubb,  as reported in the Nation  on November 1, 1845, also took part in public meetings. Political involvement and charity were second nature for the Quakers of Cahir. The second Earl of Glengall,  Richard Butler , the town’s leading member of the gentry, also contributed to relief. He “ did much for the relief of the poor and the starving ,” so much so that his existing “town improvement plan was shelved in 1847” due to his “fortune being tied up” in charitable giving.

Cahir and County Tipperary had their fair share of neglectful and tone-deaf figures as well. The area was a hotspot for conspicuous consumption amongst nobles during the Famine.  Scholars describe  an 1847 “picnic on a very elegant scale” that “took place at  Cahir Cottage  at which 50 people attended.” Indeed, “in September 1849 a ‘splendid fête champêtre’ took place at the same location” involving “over 250 of the aristocracy of Tipperary.” Landlords perpetuated “a level of evictions in" the county that “was some twenty times that of Fermanagh, the county with the lowest incidence of clearance.” In terms of government response, little evidence exists of a widespread effort to relieve the ills in rural Cahir. The  closest workhouse, according to a database on the Poor Law Unions,  was located in Clogheen, more than eight miles away from Cahir.

The period from 1845 to 1855 was an era of great upheaval for rural Cahir, a decade marked by depopulation and economic dislocation. Those who survived and remained saw their lives upended. Still, some level of relief came from Cahir’s wealthy Quakers and figures like the Earl of Glengall. Meanwhile, the response of the larger Anglican political establishment was shoddier, marked by distance, apathy, and questionable efficacy. Cloistered away in private estates or more familiar with the surprising resilience of urban Cahir, these groups were isolated from the worst effects of the Famine. In this separation, it is clear that class, urban geography, and religion continued to influence Cahir even at the height of crisis.

According to George Henry Bassett’s  The Book of County Tipperary  (1889), Cahir’s population fell by around 1,000 between the end of the famine and 1881. Meanwhile, “flour-milling [was] the only industry remaining,” in contrast to “thirty-five years ago” when Cahir “was in the flood tide of prosperity.” Conditions were bad enough that the  Sisters of Mercy , an Irish order of nuns, sent a mission from Cashel to Cahir in 1879 as part of their goal of “amelioration of the poverty and deprivation of the poor.” Indeed, 13.5 of every 1,000 people in County Tipperary emigrated between 1856 and 1910 (2). Even so, the town's cooperative butter company was formed in 1886 with rules meant to protect farmers and divide profits. Land strife across the country was avoided as well, and the “purchase by tenants of their holdings appears to have been handled without much strife”  amidst low unemployment .

Meanwhile, the Second Earl of Glengall  declared bankruptcy in 1853  and sold his estates. The property had two buyers, mainly including the Cahir Grubbs. While the Grubbs’ fortunes waxed in the 1850s, the Butlers’ waned: indeed, the earlship died out with Richard Butler’s 1858 death. Butler’s only daughter, Margaret Butler Charteris, married the Earl of Fife from eastern Scotland in that same year, and the pair repurchased part of the land and “built  Caher Park  as the family home.” Even so, Margaret was an “absentee landlord” and “resident in London.” Still, she proved to be an “improving” presence who funded street lamps and made Cahir one of the “the first towns in Munster to have a fresh water supply.” Despite losing their title, the Butler line remained prominent in the local area.

Cahir maintained a robust culture of both formal and folk religion throughout this era. For one, an  1864 report  recorded a convent school in nearby Cashel that taught 644 Catholics. This illustrates a robust ecclesiastical presence and a decent opportunity for secondary education around Cahir. Still, the most striking symbols of faith were simple. Tobar Iosa, or “Jesus’ Well,” was a devotion site that hosted a Christmas Eve celebration and represented these trends. The well is  visually remarkable  and has 8th century roots, and it consists of a central stone tablet rising over a pool of water amidst a lovely wooded setting. The tablet has a carved cross on its face, created during the latter half of the 19th century.

Amidst this mix of socioeconomic change and religious continuity, Cahir’s politics matched the tenor of the post-Famine Irish nation. The first local happenings occurred around the time of 1867’s Fenian Rising. For instance, the  Freeman's Journal  reported on March 16th, 1866 of a Cahir-born Fenian who escaped from prison, and a  Kerry Evening Post  piece from two months prior reported that local magistrates had met in Cahir to discuss a statement by Denis Boland, a local Fenian. His statement, notable for its fiery language, read: 

Fenians! The day is not far when the persecuted sons of Erin shall be risen from slavery to freedom, and the Green Flag of Erin shall float on the breeze, surrounded by true Irishmen. May the winds of Freedom soon speed O’Mahony o’er. To hell with the Saxon tyrants! I am, yours truly, Head Centre. God save the Green.

Famed Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa sparked a firestorm when he stood to be Tipperary’s MP in 1869: the resulting race saw “ farmers...taken out of their beds...and forced to swear that they would vote ” for him, priests “roughly treated,” and hundreds of pounds of damage done. O’Donovan Rossa won the day because the constituency was sickened by “harsh treatment” and “emotive issues.” The Fenian leader was later disqualified and returned to America, and by 1874 County Tipperary faced a five-candidate slate as “one of the few constituencies” with “conflict between the contrasting nationalist groups.” Nonetheless, outside of O’Donovan Rossa’s spell as an MP and a brief period in 1875, post-Famine Tipperary was  represented by non-Fenian , constitutional nationalists.

Post-Famine Cahir saw its fair share of change and activity, and in this it reflected the trends of a restless time for Ireland as a whole. Population decline and economic shifts hint at stagnation in the town of Cahir, but certain rural trends of ascendant business and activism reflect better times for the countryside. Religious devotion stayed strong for Catholics, but the Quaker elite and titled nobility saw their status decline or evolve. Cahir, in its Tipperary setting, played a modest but active role in national politics, hosting great Republican figures like O’Donovan Rossa while mostly reflecting the zeitgeist in a subtler fashion. Through this potpourri of changes, improvements, and setbacks, Cahir was undoubtedly altered by the end of the 19th century.

The run-up to Irish independence saw the fortunes of the Grubb and Butler-Charteris families diverge. Richard Grubb passed away in 1894, as reported in an  Irish Daily Independent  article on Grubb’s estate sale from January 12th of that year. The old flour mills, Cahir Abbey House, and the rest of the holdings were valued at more than £400 per annum in total. Beyond this major estate sale, the Grubbs also divested themselves of the Quaker House, with the  Presbyterian church buying  the facility in 1897 after having leased it for a few years. The Grubb name appears in Clonmel- and Clogheen-centric news reports after 1894, but no other Grubb-to-Cahir connection is evident from this point on.

Meanwhile, the presence of the Butler-cum-Charteris family persisted in Cahir. Lady Charteris took on a more active role from the noughts onward. A November 5th, 1910  article from The Nationalist  glowingly noted that the local football club played at Cahir Park, “which Lady Margaret Charteris (in addition to her other gifts to the Cahir people, including waterworks, ball court, reading rooms, etc.)” allowed for free. Meanwhile, her son Richard Charteris rose to the rank of  Lieutenant Colonel within the British military  by the First World War. As he served, Lady Charteris hosted wounded Royal Irish Regiment soldiers at her Cahir home, as per a September 27, 1915  Irish Examiner report . Later that year, Margaret passed away, and Richard returned to Cahir Park in 1918 to continue the family’s charity via donations to Irish nurses according to  The Nationalist  newspaper on August 8, 1918. These examples illustrate a continued sense of noblesse oblige that occupied the clan. Widespread Quaker charity may have faded in Cahir, but the mantle was picked up by the Butler-Charteris line.

After the Great War, tumult came to Cahir in earnest, spiking during the Irish War of Independence when it served as an RIC barrack site and an IRA haunt for leaders like Ernie O’Malley. Contemporary combatants explained through  interviews  that “Cahir...was a garrison town” where “most of the population were the loyalist type;” it “was considered a good place for the people in Dublin to send consignments of arms for Tipperary Volunteers.” This aspect encouraged conflict. Figures like O’Malley masterminded  assaults on a rifle range  in Cahir that was “daily used by military from Cahir Barracks” and “nearly always guarded and under military observation,” leading to “a great amount of damage" in one typical incident.

Conditions remained brutal in Cahir as the War of Independence bled into the Irish Civil War. Out-and-out conflict was common, as in April 1921 when a “party of seven or eight British soldiers...from the Cahir direction” shot the horses of  Dinny Lacey's Flying Column  and marched them towards town, only to be ambushed in return.  Tipperary newspapers  who dared to support the Treaty were “suppressed by the I.R.A.” and had their “machinery...dismantled.” Martial law had been in place for a year and half by 1922, and in Tipperary the law held that “'a civilian with his hands in his pockets is necessarily an object of suspicion” who could be “liable to arrest” or, “in an emergency,” run “the risk of coming under fire.” In 1923,  four Republican prisoners  from Tipperary were executed by the Free State government. Given all this, it is no surprise that scholars paint Tipperary as one of the “ most violent places in the civil war .”

Thus, Cahir’s lot during the revolutionary period comes off as a rather bleak time. On one hand, the interreligious and inter-class amity of the nineties, noughts, and beyond shines as a positive example, and the First World War seems to have stirred feelings of unity and patriotism. However, later years were dominated by fighting and political violence. Even the good times were marked by population decline. Still, this bleakness was representative of the age for Ireland. This was a hard time for the country, one that left and continues to leave its mark on Cahir and the nation as a whole.

According to  census data , the Cahir electoral area housed just under 12,500 individuals in 1936, a decline of 800 or so from a decade prior. The town’s population came in at 1,638. Of this tally, a huge majority (1,576 residents) were Catholic, representing a stunning extent of homogeneity. Exact occupational data was not recorded at the town level, but South Tipperary was a hugely agrarian region in 1936; nearly 18,000 men and women were engaged in agriculture, with the next most common industry of construction falling below even 2,000 participants. Even by 1966, only 38% of Cahir's residents advanced past primary education, and just under 4% completed university.

Ireland remained neutral in the Second World War, but the conflict bypassed Cahir less than one might think. Arguably the most exciting story relating the town to the war was the  2009 discovery  of a live WWII-vintage hand grenade on a Cahir estate. Still, some natives of the town also found their way into the conflict. Cahir’s St. Mary’s cemetery, a plot of a few dozen grave sites adjacent to a beautiful old church, houses the remains of one  person who died during the war  (3). Private Isabella Mullinger of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s volunteer branch of the British Army, died on May 7, 1945, just one day before V-E Day.

In terms of the male contribution from Cahir,  Ralph Ferns  joined the Canadian military during the conflict and even helped to storm Normandy on D-Day, only to die in obscurity at the hands of friendly fire a month later.  Johnny O’Brien  received honors from the President of Ireland in 2011 and Queen Elizabeth in 2013 for his dogged maintenance of the town’s war memorial. The previously pictured memorial was erected in the interwar period of the 1930s to honor WWI veterans like O’Brien’s father, only to be rededicated to all soldiers from Cahir  amidst suspicions toward the British .

Meanwhile, the Butler-Charteris family finally exited Cahir in the 1960s. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Butler Charteris, son of Lady Margaret of charitable notoriety,  passed away in 1961 . Upon his death,  Cahir Park and the other family holdings were sold  in what amounted to something like 4,000 acres worth of real estate transactions. Uniquely, the Irish Land Commission bought most of the land and distributed it among farmers in the area.

Decades earlier, the Butler-Charteris family had divested themselves of Cahir House in what appears now as a sign of things to come for the Irish economy. Indeed, from 1927 on into the 1970s, the facility was leased by Nora Burke and  operated as a hotel , presaging the rise of tourism as a key economic driver in Irish society. As early as 1939, government ministers recognized that “tourism already comprised a considerable segment of the economy” as it “directly support[ed] some twenty thousand Irish citizens” (4). Somewhere like Cahir would hardly be an international destination, but its historic castle and scenic views of the Suir may have been a boon given that “tourists need not come from outside of Ireland.” Internal tourism was a real draw. As seen in the employment data above, Cahir and its environs were hardly centers of industry beyond small-scale agriculture, but the existence of a modest hospitality scene shows that the rising tide of Irish society did lift all boats in small ways. 

Today, the town of Cahir is home to 3,593 residents, having  grown by about 29%  since the year 2000. The town center is “set within a historic square” and “has [a] vibrant commercial core, a unique sense of place and high-quality natural environment” based around the “Suir Blueway[’s]...many community and tourism initiatives at the river.” Denominational ghettoization is not a concern as it was in the pre-Famine era, needless to say. The town’s modern economy is entirely different compared to the post-Famine doldrums. Industrial manufacturing and retail respectively compose 30% and 25% of Cahir’s economic activity, and financial services and information technology even account for a 10% share each. Domestic firms like “Oakpark Foods, AIBP and Munster Protein” represent “large-scale employers,” showing how granular local investment can trump FDI in certain locales. Politically, the town has been represented by Marie Murphy of Fine Gael at the municipal district level. Her party paints itself as the voice of the “ progressive centre ” and an advocate for Europe, positions that show the great distance travelled from the days of violence.

Ireland is increasingly marked by “multiculturalism” and the “triumph of agency over structural constraint,” and the return of migrants in recent decades has injected a “highly educated group that has amassed considerable cultural capital” into the nation (5). All of these developments deepened already-rising secularism and diversity, even in places like Cahir. Statistics bear out these changes, but so do subtler pieces of everyday evidence. Tobar Iosa “was destroyed by an anti religious fanatic” around  2009  despite its “very long association with the town.”

Meanwhile, in places like Cahir during the 1800s, people “ relied solely on potatoes  for their diet, and the crop accounted for 60% of national food production as rural peoples practiced an effective ‘monodiet.’” This uniformity contributed to the Famine, but it also sets the stage for a comparison with the modern cuisine of the town.  Tripadvisor  rates the  Lava Rock Restaurant  as Cahir’s finest restaurant, and, far beyond potatoes, one can indulge on Thai green curry, falafel, or confit duck leg for less than €20.00 each. International, multicultural cuisine is part of everyday life, and economic success has made imported, nutritious ingredients things to be taken for granted. Evidence of change is clear even in these seemingly minor contexts.

Analyzing across these varied factors, one could see Cahir as completely different than its nineteenth century counterpart. Especially since independence and the Second World War, the quickening pace of socioeconomic and cultural change in Ireland seems to have swept away the quirks that made the town a unique place. As with any generalization, this line of thinking misses the mark. Cahir is what it is today because of historical processes of change. The legacy of Quaker mills, post-ascendancy noble charity, recent migration, and political violence deeply inform the identities of the people who call Cahir home. One could look at the town and see something wholly new, but the triumphs and tragedies of the last two centuries define Cahir as both a product of Ireland’s historical tide and a paramount example of singular local uniqueness.