“A young man from our ranks
A cannon he let go
And slapped it into Lord Mountjoy
A tyrant he laid low”
“The Boys of Wexford”, Robert Joyce and Arthur Darley.
Luke Gardiner, 1st Viscount Mountjoy (1745-1798),
painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Source Wikipedia
Nearly two hundred years before my arrival, the United Irishmen, frustrated by the lack of political reform in Ireland and inspired by the American and French revolutions, rebelled against British rule in Ireland. Just before dawn on the 5th of June 1798, ten thousand rebels attacked two thousand five hundred government troops garrisoned in New Ross, County Wexford. Luke Gardiner, the 1st Viscount Mountjoy, died leading the Catholic Dublin Militia against the rebels. The rebellion, which would cost the lives of tens of thousands of people,[1] was suppressed, and before long, Ireland and Britain became a United Kingdom. It was the ghost of Mountjoy that is said to haunt the grounds of Mountjoy Barracks.
Mountjoy House, the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland, was already nearly one hundred years old by the time the Survey arrived in 1824. It had been built in 1728 by the grandfather of Viscount Mountjoy, also called Luke Gardiner, one of two Keepers of the Park. Originally called Castleknock Lodge, it had become known as Mountjoy House over time. The first Luke Gardiner had been a property developer in Dublin and is famous for laying out Gardiner’s Mall, which was later renamed Sackville Street and then became O’Connell Street. He bequeathed his Estate to his son, Charles, who, in turn, left it to his son, Luke.
The second Luke Gardiner was elevated to the Irish peerage as the First Viscount Mountjoy, a title revived through his grandmother Anne Stewart’s family, wife of the first Luke Gardner. Luke (junior) built a theatre in which Macbeth was said to have been acted. at the rear of the house with widely admired decorative plasterwork that was still visible within the old administrative offices in 1994. He was said to have “had the gentlest manners, and the mildest affections, warm and sincere in friendship, and so benevolent and humane that he never harboured revenge”.
Private residences and interests gradually disappeared from the Phoenix Park, following the purchase by the government of the Viceregal Lodge (now Áras an Uachtaráin) in 1782. By the end of the eighteenth century, Mountjoy House had also been bought by the Government for the Secretary of War. By 1812, barracks and a parade ground had been built to house the cavalry escort for the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, resident at the Viceregal Lodge, and became known as Mountjoy Barracks. As a military building, it came under the control of the Board of Ordnance, and in 1825, this “admirable house” [2] was handed over for the use of the recently established Trigonometrical Survey of Ireland.
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[1] “The Gardiner Family”, S J Murphy, Studies Irish Genealogy and Heraldry 2010, p28-35.
[2] The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey”, Colonel Sir Charles Close, Institution of Royal Engineers, 1926.
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