Old Flames – Frank McNally on a Parisian tribute to Ireland and the tragic saga of Mayo’s Moore Hall

A coincidence of emails this week reminded me that 2023 marks the centenaries of two incendiary events, very different in most respects but not unconnected.

This coming November, it will be 100 years since the lighting of the “Eternal Flame” under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

The feature was added to a site where, two years earlier, the remains of an unknown soldier, exhumed from the countless graves of the first World War, had been reburied, as a tribute to all those who had died fighting for France.

Since 1923, every evening at 6.30pm, the flame is dimmed and then rekindled.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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But on Thursday last, for the first time, the ceremony was dedicated to the thousands of Irish who fought in Napoleon’s Légion Irlandaise or in the Brigade Irlandaise of earlier French armies.

After the Williamite Wars of 1689-91, 13,000 Irish fighting men and their families were exiled to France.

It is estimated that in the centuries since, the so-called Wild Geese and their descendants contributed no fewer than half a million soldiers to French armies.

As it is every day, Thursday’s event was overseen by the Comité de la Flamme. Irish ambassador Niall Burgess attended, as did members of the Cremona Heritage group, who afterwards co-hosted a reception at the conveniently located Irish Embassy, only metres away on Rue Rude.

The Irish-themed flaring of the flame – now expected to be an annual event – coincided with the 225th anniversary of General Humbert’s 1798 campaign, commemorations of which are ongoing and will culminate – as the original event did, but less bloodily, we hope – next weekend in a mass reenactment at Ballinamuck, Co Longford.

The name of Cremona Heritage group, by the way, commemorates a once-famous but now forgotten battle of 1702 in Italy, in which Irish emigrés helped the French to repel an Austrian attack on that walled city.

Unlike Fontenoy (1745), to my knowledge, the battle has never enjoyed the ultimate Irish tribute of having GAA clubs named after it.

But it did inspire a ballad by Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as the name of a road in Ballyfermot and a large manor house in Swords, where the heritage group and its museum (cremonaheritage.ie) is now based.

Mention of big houses brings me to the other incendiary anniversary of 2023. In fact, as Terry Dooley’s recent book Burning the Big House records, there all too many such events during Ireland’s revolutionary years, culminating with a campaign by anti-Treaty forces in the Civil War that consigned many stately homes to the ashes.

But chief among the architectural tragedies was the razing of Moore Hall in Co Mayo on the last night of January 1923, and with it the culmination of an extraordinary family saga that had spanned two revolutions.

The story is told in a new book, The Irish Merchant of Alicante by Michael Gerard, pen name of the real-life Gerry Kenny, a Mayoman now resident in South Carolina.

His tale of four generations takes its title from the George Moore who, as a Catholic second son, fled the Penal Laws in 1754, made a fortune trading wine and iodine (extracted from Irish seaweed) in Spain, and returned to build a mansion in Mayo just in time for the tumultuous events of 1798.

His son John, educated on the continent, became a convert to the ideals of Wolfe Tone and Humbert.

He was the first and so far only president of the “Republic of Connacht”, enjoying the title for about a week, before dying as a prisoner, aged 30, an event that also hastened his father’s demise.

The book’s next George Moore precipitated a split in the family by marrying Louisa Browne, daughter or a man whose enthusiasm for hanging Mayo rebels had earned the nickname “Denis-the-Rope”.

The third-generation George was a popular MP and racehorse trainer, a fervent nationalist reputed to have taken the Fenian oath. He was also a philanthropist of the Famine who, when his horse won the Chester Cup, spent the prize money on a shipload of American grain to feed the starving.

Finally, there was George Moore the writer (1852-1933), who is argued by some to have been the first great modern Irish novelist.

After converting to Protestantism and then leaving Ireland for London in 1911, he also wrote a memoir, Hail and Farewell, which – he joked – divided Dublin into two groups: “One half is afraid it will be in the book, and the other is afraid it won’t.”

Among the many people who did feature, unflatteringly, was his brother Maurice. By the time of the Civil War, they were no longer speaking to each other, a microcosm of the strife around them, although it was probably Maurice’s pro-Treaty stance rather than George’s general unpopularity that sealed their mansion’s fate.

The burnt-out shell of Moore Hall haunts the cover of The Irish Merchant of Alicante, which the author tells me is now available from Amazon and selected bookshops.