Keane, Marcus

by James Quinn

Keane, Marcus (1815–83), land agent and antiquarian, was born on 7 February 1815, probably at the family seat of Beech Park, near Ennis, Co. Clare, the sixth son of thirteen children (eight boys and five girls) of Robert Keane (1774–1839), a landlord, land agent and JP, and his wife Jane (d. 1842). The family were Church of Ireland. Robert (known as 'Long Bob') was generally considered a fair agent and a popular figure in the locality; his eldest son, Dr Charles Keane, died tending to cholera victims in 1832.

On his father's death in 1839, Marcus took over his lands and agencies, and was elected to the inaugural board of the Ennis poor law guardians. Although a minor landlord, he was agent for some of the biggest landowners in the Kilrush poor law union, such as the 2nd Marquess Conyngham (qv), Crofton Moore Vandeleur (qv) and Nicholas Westby (1787–1860) of Kilballyowen. In 1847 he married Westby's daughter Louisa Isabella (d. 1894), significantly enhancing his status among the Clare gentry. He testified to the Devon commission in 1844 on landlord–tenant relations, and suggested that agricultural productivity could be improved by giving tenants greater security of tenure. After the failure of the potato crop in 1845, he served on several relief committees, advocating schemes for assisted emigration and seed purchase, which proved wholly inadequate to deal with the unfolding catastrophe. As the famine worsened, his reputation as a 'stringent and successful collector of rents' (Murphy, Starving, 53) encouraged additional landlords to entrust him with the management of their estates. By the late 1840s he was responsible for over 100,000 acres, including almost 40 per cent of the Kilrush union, which he managed with considerable autonomy.

In 1845 the Kilrush union was home to over 80,000 people, mostly impoverished cottiers subsisting on potatoes, for whom the famine was especially severe and prolonged. To lower his clients' liability for poor rates, Keane embarked on wholesale clearances. During 1847–8 he evicted hundreds of families from Kilrush, Kilmaley, Kilmacduane and Meelick, undeterred by press condemnation or official disquiet. He was widely regarded as indifferent to the misery of the poor: one newspaper claimed 'he was unhappy when not exterminating' (Limerick Reporter, 24 November 1848). Clearances continued on an even greater scale into 1849, with extensive evictions in Meelick followed by the levelling of hundreds of homes to prevent tenants from returning. Keane was rarely present at evictions himself, but directed a well-staffed and efficiently-run operation that employed several legal advisors and clerks, and a large number of underagents, bailiffs, rent collectors and his infamous 'wreckers', who physically ejected occupiers and demolished their cabins. Among his most active underagents was his youngest brother, Henry Keane (d. 1884), also renowned for his callousness. The Keane family were noted for their evangelical beliefs, and Henry was a strict sabbatarian, who took several prosecutions against shopkeepers in Ennis for Sunday trading.

Marcus Keane's extensive clearances in Kilrush were detailed in the reports (1848–9) of the local poor law inspector Arthur Kennedy (qv), which featured in the press and parliamentary speeches. In August 1849 Keane defended his actions in a petition presented to the house of commons and demanded a parliamentary investigation to clear his name. Appearing at Westminster in July 1850 before a commons committee investigating the administration of the poor law in the Kilrush union, he admitted there was much misery in Kilrush, but strongly disagreed with Kennedy as to its causes, claiming that excessive rents were not charged on lands under his management, that there had been relatively few evictions, and that homes were rarely destroyed. He claimed to have shown considerable sympathy to the poor and only to have evicted those who had not paid rent or were living on deserted and unproductive land. He showed no regret for his actions and argued that by encouraging industrious tenants to take over vacant farms he was improving the local economy. Even then, with falling rents and rising poor rates, he insisted that many landlords faced bankruptcy. Much of his evidence was refuted by the committee's investigations (particularly those of the land agent and civil engineer Francis Coffey), which found that Keane was responsible for 20 per cent of all evictions in the Kilrush union and that on the properties he administered some 500 cabins had been levelled, making about 2,800 persons homeless.

Keane's reputation as a proselytiser contributed to his notoriety. He was charged with this on several occasions, notably in 1851 when Fr Michael Meehan, the catholic parish priest of Moyarta and Kilballyowen, accused him of coercing catholic tenants in Kilbaha to convert to protestantism. Keane's refusal to allow a catholic church to be built at Loop Head (because it went against the wishes of the local landlord Edward Westby) was also attributed to his anti-catholic prejudices.

In the early 1850s Keane took advantage of post-famine insolvencies to build up his own estate, buying 1,000 acres in the barony of Moyarta from the Hickman Kilrush estate. He also persisted with evictions, carrying out further clearances in Kilkee in 1863 in which seventy-four dwellings were levelled. By the 1870s he had built up an estate of almost 5,000 acres in Clare, including lands in the baronies of Islands and Bunratty Upper. Becoming concerned at the Fenian sympathies of some tenants, he attributed them to the injustices of the Irish land system and suggested that those in residence for over ten years should have a legal claim on their farms.

Keane felt a deep attachment to his family's lands, and the abundance of ancient sites in the locality stimulated his lifelong interest in antiquities. The Keanes claimed descent from the northern O'Cahanes, and owned Inis Cathaigh (Scattery Island) off the coast of Kilrush (Marcus maintained a holiday home there). Since medieval times the family had in their possession the bell shrine of St Senán (qv) from the abbey of Inis Cathaigh, still venerated by local people in the mid-nineteenth century. Keane was particularly interested in ecclesiastical ruins and travelled throughout Ireland to view them (while visiting Kilkenny in 1866, he was arrested on suspicion of being a Fenian). He wrote The towers and temples of ancient Ireland; their origin and history discussed from a new point of view (Dublin, 1867), in which he claimed that round towers and other ecclesiastical stone buildings were not the work of Christian monks but of pagan craftsmen, many built 1,000 years before the coming of Christianity to Ireland by the Tuatha Dé Danaan and their seafaring Cuthite predecessors who had arrived from the Middle East. His theory was generally dismissed, the origins of round towers having been settled for most scholars by George Petrie (qv) over twenty years earlier. It did not, however, prevent Keane's election as a member of the RIA in 1867, with Samuel Ferguson (qv) and William Wilde (qv) among his proposers.

Marcus Keane died on 29 October 1883, and was buried at old Kilmaley churchyard, about six miles from Ennis. The funeral was well attended by the county gentry and business community, and the pro-landlord Clare Journal praised his 'sound sense, sagacity and earnestness' (1 November 1883). Some time afterwards his remains were secretly removed from the burial vault and were discovered seven years later in another part of the same cemetery. The motive for this is unclear, but some locals saw it as a deliberate act of desecration by those who had not forgotten his inhumanity during the famine.

He had five sons and two daughters, and was succeeded to the Beech Park estate by his third son, Marcus Thomas Francis Keane (1854–1929), who was DL, JP and high sheriff of Co. Clare (1905), and in 1919 sold St Senán's bell shrine to the National Museum for 1,250 guineas. Marcus's brother William Keane (1818–73) was rector of Whitby, Yorkshire, and author of several polemical pamphlets, some containing strong anti-catholic views. William's son John Fryer Thomas ('Jack') Keane (1854–1937) was a renowned travel writer and one of the first Europeans to record a visit to Mecca and Medina.