Behind Enemy Lines - Frank McNally on a little piece of Cork that is forever Tipperary

Irish Times

17-07-2025

In darkest Cork, about halfway between Mallow and Macroom, is a mysterious hamlet whose name suggests the locals may have divided loyalties in this weekend's All-Ireland Hurling final.
New Tipperary, as it's known, is located 60 kilometres from the nearest border with Old Tipperary. And if it was it an attempted colonisation project bv exiles from the latter, it seems to have failed. A mere curiosity now, the name's origins appear lost to memory. Not even Logainm, the national placename database, seems to know how it derived
My suspicion, however, is that it has something to do with one Arthur Smith Barry (1843 – 1925), a landlord and politician who died 100 years in February, after a strife-filled career that straddled both these Munster counties, of which he had inherited 22,000 acres.
Born in England to an Irish father, Smith Barry also graduated to a political career, becoming MP for Cork in 1867. He was a Liberal in the party-political sense, and in many ways a progressive: supporting extension of the franchise, for example, and voting for disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. Then the Irish Land War broke out, unleashing his inner conservatism and the energies that provoked Archbishop Croke, of GAA fame, to call him an 'aggressive busybody'.
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The fate of Charles Boycott, land agent for Lord Erne in Mayo, made a deep impression on Smith Barry. Ostracised by locals, Boycott had to import 50 Orangemen from Cavan and Monaghan to save his harvest in 1880, under the protection of 1,000 police officers and at the cost of £10,000 (or about 20 times the crops' value). A broken man, he quit Ireland soon afterwards, having given his name to the language.
As the popularity of the boycotting tactic spread in subsequent years, Smith Barry was determined to defeat it with improved organisation, shrewder tactics, and the liberal use of lawyers.
Hence the Cork Defence Union, which he set up in 1885. This involved forming what the Dictionary of Irish Biography calls 'flying columns': not of mobile gunmen as would feature in a Cork of later decades, but of labourers and machinery, a sort of mercenary meitheal to harvest the crops of those boycotted.
Its work extended to guaranteeing sales outlets. This too proved surprisingly effective. In the winter of 1885-86, according to the DIB, the Cork Defence Union 'took on, and forced a draw with' the South of Ireland Cattle Dealers Association, a livestock branch of nationalism.
A weekly meeting of the CDU in September 1886, as reported by The Irish Times, sounded a self-congratulatory note. At the recent Bantry Fair, it was noted, a union member had bought 27 cattle, 'some of which bore evidence of the inhuman conduct of the 'moonlighters" in the west of Ireland, being minus their tails', and successfully placed them on his farm.
Reports were also received from several districts that, thanks to the effects of the mobile labour units, 'local men had returned to their work, and [were assisting] men of the union in saving crops'.
That was the same year nationalists launched the Plan of Campaign, under which tenants would seek reduced rents after bad harvests, failing which they would withhold rent altogether, diverting the money into a central campaign fund.
One of Smith Barry's other big battles of the late 1880s involved supporting a fellow Cork landlord, Charles Ponsonby, against this plan. First, he bankrolled his resistance. Then, when Ponsonby was ready to accept a deal that would have collapsed local land values, Smith Barry worked with the Irish chief secretary to thwart it, before leading a syndicate that bought the estate.
But it so happened that Smith Barry also owned the town of Tipperary, or at least the land it was on. And at the height of the dispute in Cork, the Tipp tenants withheld their rents in sympathy. Led by politician and journalist William O'Brien, they then attempted to set up a rival town on the outskirts of the original, to be called New Tipperary.
The project went as far as the opening, in April 1890, of a row of shops named William O'Brien Arcade, housing evicted traders. It didn't last. The Leeside landlord saw that off too, and for O'Brien and his supporters, it proved an expensive debacle.
In the meantime, however, it must also have spawned a New Tipperary in Cork. If only nominal, this is surely a vestige of the 1890 dispute, reciprocating the cross-border support in a rare case of shared intimacy between the counties.
Smith-Barry ended up on the wrong side of Irish history, of course. He also lived just long enough to witness the change. Fifty years after that, part of his main Cork property became the Fota Island Wildlife Park.
Although a first-class cricketer in his prime, he was probably never much of a hurling fan. So he would have been indifferent to seeing one half of a traditional Tipperary prayer answered this weekend. ie: 'Cork bet'. On the other hand, he might have had at least a passing interest in second part: 'and the hay saved'.