This article is from page 13 of the 2011-11-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 13 JPG
HE WAS known as the exterminator of Clare and, 160 years after the height of his reign, notorious landlord Marcus Keane hasn’t been forgiven or forgotten.
This fact of life that the evils of the Great Famine in Clare may be out of sight but are still not out of mind has been hammered home this week with the desecration of a plaque bearing Marcus Keane’s name.
The plaque was erected a number of years ago as part of an Ennis Town Council initiative which was designed to give formal recognition to some of the town’s famous inhabitants or to people associated with the county capital.
Keane lived in Beechpark, Ennis, and by the 1870s his estate had grown to 4,784 acres across the county. But it was his role as an agent for some of Clare’s biggest landlords that earned him the infamous moniker of “the Clare exterminator”.
The plaque bearing his name doesn’t detail any of his exploits, but has now been scarred with the word “evictor” by someone, as a reminder to others as to Keane’s lead role during the Great Famine in Clare.
This dark period of Irish history has just been the subject of a new
book written by ac
claimed Ennis histo
rian Ciaran Ó Mur
chadha called Grea t
Fa mine: Irela nd’s
Agony 1845-1852 . In
it, Ó Murchadha re
veals, “In Clare, Mar
cus Keane tells us that
he employed about 40
wreckers, who other
accounts characterise
as youths or young
men, furtive, uneasy starvelings taken off the streets of Ennis.”
He also says that “in the Kilrush union alone, exterminating landlords led by Crofton Vandeleur and Marcus Keane evicted 20,000 persons between 1847 and 1854”.