Kennerk, Barry

Barry Kennerk is a post-graduate student affiliated with St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, researching the Fenians. His first book, The Railway House – Tales From an Irish Fireside, was published in 2008.

He works at the Children’s University Hospital, Temple Street. He is married with two children and lives in Ashbourne, County Meath. Barry Kennerk on his interest in history:

'It started with a cannonball!'

If I were asked to pinpoint exactly when my interest in history began, I would have to refer back to the late 1980s – a time when a lot of changes were taking place in my home city of Dublin. I was raised in an old Victorian house on the North Strand, built as part of an early suburb when the town began to grow beyond the confines of the Royal and Grand Canals. The building, with its original sash windows lay directly across the road from an old coach house, the evening sun over which made the warped nineteenth-century fanlight glass shimmer. These were the days before smokeless fuel. When winter smog descended, it cloyed the street corners and rolled over the tarred roads – their original cobblestones visible at the footpath edges. For a young, imaginative boy, it was not hard to conjure up images of the city’s past.

In 1988, the city’s millennium celebrations got underway. I and my classmates were taken on a school trip to see the reconstructed Viking ship on the Dublin docks and the city fathers marked the festivities with specially-commissioned 50p coins and milk bottles. I realise now that there was a certain amount of incongruity to all of this. On one hand, Dubliners were keen to commemorate their past but on the other, they stood by and allowed important elements of their architectural and cultural heritage to slip away. Many people still recall the destruction of the Wood Quay archaeological site and further down the river, the future of Temple Bar, with its narrow thoroughfares and choking traffic remained under threat due to the planned CIE transportation centre – an enterprise that would have resulted in the demolition of many fine old streets.

Somewhere in the midst of that, my father found himself at the head of several ANCO (later FAS) restoration projects. During the late 1980s, he worked as a foreman on St. Anne’s Church, Dawson Street, the Tailor’s Hall (An Taisce’s headquarters) and St. Doulagh’s Church, Kinsealy. Wide-eyed and eager to learn, I was taken to visit each site, yellow hard hat in place. St. Anne’s was a particularly challenging job. After removing the rotten slates on the roof, my father and a young apprentice spent seven or eight months on a scaffold, perched like two Renaissance painters just two metres below the porch ceiling. They installed a new one made entirely from teak and used traditional jointing instead of nails or screws.

St. Doulagh’s was a particularly interesting project due to the rediscovery of its ancient baptistery, also known as ‘St Doulagh’s well’. An over-arching octagonal stone building needed to be fully reconstructed as well as an adjacent open air pool known as ‘St Catherine’s pond’. It was difficult to source local stonemasons so my father was obliged to learn some of those skills himself. He passed them to his young apprentices with help from Glasnevin Cemetery’s manager. A large amount of brush and trees was cleared in the process and some early or pre-Christian burials were discovered. As children, we often received old coins which had been dragged up from the bottom of the old baptistery.

What really fired my interest by far however was a small 42lb iron cannonball which my father brought home from the grounds of the Tailor’s Hall in 1988. He discovered it as the FAS team cleared rubble from the foundations of some nineteenth-century houses flanking the Back Lane entrance. At twelve years old, I held a real piece of history in my hand. It had come from one of six possible attacks on the walled city of Dublin but was most likely fired in a failed assault on the castle during the rebellion of ‘Silken’ Thomas Fitzgerald in 1534. For a long time, we kept the cannonball in my father’s workroom – an area at the back of the house which housed a carpenter’s bench and tools. It lay there amid an aroma of wood shavings and whetstone oil but when it almost fell on my foot, it was shuttled off to the museum.

Meanwhile, under the supervision of Dublin architect Austin Dunphy, the renovation of Tailor’s Hall was completed and the building went on to receive the coveted Europa Nostra award. Afterwards, there were several other jobs to which my father lent his advice or support such as the restoration of Drimnagh Castle. Another notable job was the Collon Coach project. Prior to its restoration, it had been decided that the coach would be used for trips around Dublin Zoo, but when my father sourced a professional coach painter, the final result was so fine that it was placed on display at Newbridge House and Farm. During these years, there were also occasional visits to the home of Architectural Historian Peter Pearson in Dun Laoghaire whose hallway was crammed with the rescued parts of old houses.

When I first discovered that Shadow of the Brotherhood was going to be published, I began to reflect on these interesting childhood years. I had ‘shadowed’ the footsteps of some fine old tradespeople and as a result harboured a desire to make my own contribution to the history of Dublin. My new book had not started out as such but grew instead from a long article about the progress of Fenianism in the aftermath of the 1867 rising. My chance discovery of Constable Kelly and Keenas’ medical notes had allowed me to add a very human dimension to the story and the piece gradually developed into a book.

Recalling that elusive little cannonball and the pivotal role it played, I spent weeks trying to track it down. Several e-mails and phone calls later, I realised that the National Museum did not have a catalogue listing. A tip from the antiquities division in May 2010 finally steered me in the right direction and with the help of the Civic Museum, I finally located it lying quietly in storage, listed as an item of unknown provenance. Holding it in my hand at the Gilbert Library after an absence of over twenty years, memories came flooding back. I had forgotten how, instead of being a smooth lump of iron, it was mottled in parts with reddish metal slag. I turned it over carefully several times, wondering what my father would make of it. We parted company more gracefully the second time; I taking particular care to mind my toes.