The History of 17 Avenue SW

Killarney featured prominently in early Irish history, with religious settlements playing an important part of its recorded history. Its first significantly historical settlement was the monastery on nearby Innisfallen Island founded in 640 by St. Finian the Leper, which was occupied for approximately 850 years. It operated until the monks were dispossessed in 1594 by Elizabeth I, Queen of England. According to tradition, the Irish High King Brian Boru received his education at Innisfallen. The island's monastic ruins were later refurbished by the Kenmare estate as a dining place for visitors, part of a broader effort by the town's landlords to open the area up to tourism. Aghadoe, the local townland which overlooks present day Killarney, may have begun as a pagan religious site. The site has also been associated with the 5th century missionary St. Abban, but 7th century ogham stones mark the first clear evidence of Aghadoe being used as an important site. According to legend, St. Finian founded a monastery at Aghadoe in the 6th or 7th century. The first written record of a monastery dates from 939 AD in the Annals of Innisfallen where the Aghadoe monastery is referred to as the "Old Abbey." Muckross Abbey was founded in 1448 as a Franciscan friary for the Observantine Franciscans by Donal McCarthy Mor. The abbey was burned down by Cromwellian forces under General Ludlow in 1654, and today remains a ruin. By the 18th century, the friary's cloister, with its enormous yew tree, had become one of the district's most visited ruins, though the quantity of disinterred human bone left underfoot there drew repeated complaints from travel writers until the Herbert family eventually had the site cleared. }} Killarney's tourism history goes back at least to the mid 18th century, when Thomas, fourth Viscount Kenmare (Lord Kenmare), began to attract visitors and new residents to the town. The date of 1747 was used in recent 250-year celebrations to honour the history of Killarney tourism, though a report previewing those celebrations instead dated the town's beginnings as a tourist resort to 1754, the year Kenmare came into his inheritance. On travelling to the estate he had inherited, Kenmare found boggy, barren land and considerable debt, but recognised the tourism potential of the lakes' islands and of Muckross Abbey and Ross Castle, and set about planting trees, draining bogs, mending roads and encouraging the building of inns. The house was sold on twice before its final private owners, the barrister Arthur Rose Vincent and his parents-in-law, presented the 11,000-acre estate to the Irish state in 1932 as the Bourn Vincent Memorial Park, forming the country's first national park, later expanded by further donations including Killarney House. but by 1854, one year after the coming of the railway, James Fraser named seven hotels and described their locations:<blockquote>the Railway Hotel opposite the Railway Station; the Kenmare Arms and Hibernia which are on the main street and immediately opposite the church... the Victoria which is about a mile [1.5&nbsp;km] to the west of the town on the shores of the Lower Lake; the Lake View which is about the same distance to the east of the town and also on the shore of the Lower Lake; the Muckross about two and a half miles [4&nbsp;km] away and near the Muckross Lake and the Torc which occupies an elevated site about a mile and a half [2.5&nbsp;km] from the town on the hill which rises immediately over the Lake Hotel.</blockquote> An 1852 guidebook, the Irish Tourist's Illustrated Handbook for Visitors to Ireland, devoted several pages to Killarney and to the prices then charged by the town's hotels, reflecting the district's status as one of Ireland's best known destinations by the mid 19th century, alongside places such as the Giant's Causeway and Bray. In 1858, Irish-born Victorian journalist, Samuel Carter Hall named O'Sullivan's Hotel and the Innisfallen rather than the Hibernia and Torc, but Isaac Slater also named the Hibernia in 1846. At the time he was writing, tours of the Ring of Kerry were already an industry and Killarney was considered the starting point of the circuitous route. He was fascinated by the horses' endurance on the two-day trip, and leaves clear advice for other travellers; <blockquote> It is a common and wise custom of those who make this tour, and are not pressed for time, to hire the carriage at the hotel in Killarney and continue with it 'all the way round.' It is absolutely marvellous what these mountain bred horses can get through "thinking nothing" of thirty miles [50&nbsp;km] for days together or even fifty miles [80&nbsp;km] in a single day. </blockquote> As part of the trip, he noted that there were hotels in Glenbeigh and Waterville along with a "comfortable inn", which is now the Butler Arms Hotel. A visit by Queen Victoria in 1861 gave the town some international exposure. The visit followed the West End success of Dion Boucicault's play The Colleen Bawn, which opened at London's Adelphi Theatre in September 1860 and relocated the story of the Colleen Bawn murder, a real killing that had taken place near Limerick in 1819, to the Lakes of Killarney. The queen was said to have seen the play three times and commissioned a series of paintings of its scenes, and her wish to see the landscape she had encountered on stage is thought to have contributed to her decision to visit Killarney later that year rather than the cities she had previously toured. The Great Southern Hotel was for a time taken over by the British, both as an office and barracks, and to protect the neighbouring railway station. The most notable engagement of the war in the district was the Headford Ambush of 21 March 1921, in which upwards of 30 members of the IRA's Kerry No. 2 Brigade Flying Column, led by Dan Allman, attacked a train carrying soldiers of the 1st Battalion Royal Fusiliers as it changed at Headford Junction a few kilometres from the town. The fifty-minute engagement, considered one of the largest and most successful actions fought by the IRA against regular British forces during the war, left two IRA volunteers, Allman and Jimmy Bailey, and nine Fusiliers dead, along with three civilian cattle dealers who were caught in the crossfire. Killarney was captured by pro-Treaty National Army forces within days of their seaborne landing at Fenit in early August 1922, after which the anti-Treaty IRA retreated into the surrounding hills and mountains to wage a guerrilla campaign. The town's Great Southern Hotel served as a National Army base during this period, and it was on its steps that a 17-year-old prisoner, Bertie Murphy, was shot dead in September 1922 in reprisal for an IRA ambush, one of a series of killings of prisoners carried out by pro-Treaty troops, chiefly drawn from the Dublin Guard and First Western Division, in the autumn of 1922. Killarney Town Hall was erected in Kenmare Place in around 1930. In 1965, residents on Henn Street voted on a proposal to rename Killarney's streets from their English names to Irish ones in honour of Irish patriots. The vote was tied, with the proposal defeated as a result, and locals cited both the cost of the change and a wish to preserve the town's existing street names as part of its history. Killarney's tourism infrastructure was further developed in the years following the recession of the 1930s with the establishment of Killarney Golf & Fishing Club, Fitzgerald Stadium and Killarney Racecourse. From 2022, the accommodation of Ukrainian refugees and international protection applicants in Killarney's hotels, guesthouses and hostels became a source of local debate, as the town, with a resident population of just over 14,000, was reported to be housing more than 3,000 people under state contracts by late 2022.

Source: Wikipedia