Built by the Scott family in the 1790’s Cahercon House is a 60-bedroom, Georgian mansion on 220 acres overlooking the Shannon Estuary in Killadysert, Co Clare.
Famous marriages include the nuptials of Jonh Bindon Scott’s daughter Mary getting married to Maurice O’Connell. An unhappy marriage it was as Maurice was a serial womanizer.
Cahercon was later sold to the to Luke White known in high society as new money with all the local landed gentry putting their noses up up at them. The joke was on them as Luke’s son Henry became the first Baron Annaly, and his grandson Colonel Charles William White took up residence at Cahercon in the mid-1870s, and become Lord Lieutenant of Clare.
In a very unpopular move, Charles White sold Cahercon to the Vandeleurs, troubled west Clare landlords of Dutch descent and the community was not happy about it. In the years after the Famine, Clare had the highest number of evictions, in proportion to its population, of any county in Ireland.
In 1929, Fr Timothy Leonard, a member of the order based at Cahercon, was seized by communist guerrillas while saying Mass. He was beaten and taken away for trial, and afterwards hacked to death. The following year, the head of the mission, Fr Cornelius Tierney, was also arrested by communists and died in captivity.
In the Columbans’ hands, Cahercon became St Senan’s College, a philosophical institute and seminary. A few years later, it would become a convent for the Sisters of Saint Columban, who ran a high school there until 1948.
The Columbans sold the place, in October 1962, to the Salesian sisters who turned it into a boarding school for girls. In 1970, the school turned co-ed with the admission of five boys. It was eventually amalgamated into a new community college in Killadysert, closing in 2002.
