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Kirwan
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Kirwan family arms. |
| Dalgan Park |
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| Belonging to a branch of the Galway tribe which had settled
in Cregg Castle, Baunmore, they were related to the Kirwan of Castlehackett,
they acquired the land of Dalgan in the middle of the seventeenth century.
It is most likely that Edmund Arigid Kirwan was the first to settle there,
his son Alexander succeeded him and is said to have lived there at the end
of that century. Edmund, Alexander’s son, donated a gold chalice to
the church of Shrule, bearing the inscription “Orate pro animabus Edmundi
Kirwan et uxoris ejus Margarita Kirwan qui me fieri curavit A.D. 1722”.
This chalice was made by Joyce a jeweller in Eyre st. Galway |
Dalgan Park house with union jack |
| Patrick Kirwan, in 1830, donated the present parish church
of Shrule when Teampail Cholman was burn down. He had two sons and four
daughters. Charles Lionel was his heir, Charles was made High Sheriff in
1846. He married Matilda Elizabeth of castle Douglas, Scotland, where the
family moved when they left Dalgan in 1853, having to sell their estates
through the Encumbered Estate court. They seem to have been good landlords,
but one has to remember that bonfires were lit in Shrule to greet the news
of their losing their estate, so they might not have been as popular as
generally believed. |
Dalgan Park house from Shrule side |
| It is said that the large house in Joyce park, south of the
river and outside the limit of the parish, was build by a Kirwan for his
mistress when she became pregnant, a common practice in the country at the
time, when contract marriage among landlord were only for the purpose of
strengthening a fortune and assuring an heir. The son that resulted from
that relationship later left for Australia. |
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