Life
1815-83; son of Church of Ireland landown, land-agent and JP (d.1839) in Co. Clare; acted as land-agent to the Vandeleur estate and others, controlling much of the Kilrush Poor Law Union; testified at the Devon Commission on land-relations and supported security of tenure; later served on Famine Relief Committees but collected rents throughout the catastrophe, evicting hundreds of families (‘unhappy when not exterminating’, acc. Limerick Reporter, 24 Nov. 1848); built up a vast personal estate from bankrupt estates; appeared before a Commons committee in 1850 to defend his conduct but deemed responsible for twenty per cent of all evictions in that union amounting to 2,800 homeless persons; issued The Towers and Temples of Ancient Ireland (1867), re-asserting the pagan theory of Round Towers and elected member of the RIA - with Samuel Ferguson and William Wilde among the proposers; d. 29 Oct. 1883; his remains removed by some hand and reburied elsewhere in the graveyard of Kilmaley Church. [RIA]
Works
The Towers and Temples of Ancient Ireland: Their Origin and History discussed from a new point of view (Dublin: Hodges, Smith 1867), xx, 492pp., ill [26 cm]. [BL; another copy in Belfast Central Public Library.]
Criticism
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Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2009): The entry on Keane by James Quinn details his career as an evicting land-agent and his antiquarian publication, generally characterising him as the epitome of the heartless Anglo-Irish landlord interest whose humanity and social acceptability were ultimately belied by the desecration of his grave. Among other items, the author cites Ciarán Ó Murchadha, ‘“The Exterminator General of Clare”: Marcus Keane of Beech Park (1815-1883)’ in County Clare Studies: ssays in Memory of Gerald O’Connell, Seán Ó Murchadha, Thomas Coffey and Pat Flynn, ed. Ó Murchadha (2000), pp.169–200. [See Quinn, “Marcus Keane”, in op. cit., 2009 - available online.]
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Commentary
Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination [...] (Cork UP/FDA 1996) - on The Towers and Temples of Ancient Ireland (1867): ’The text was [...] an unmitigated throwback to earlier speculations [...] wholly in a pre-scientific, Biblical frame of reference. Cuthite serpent-worship and phallus-worship is proposed as a religious substratum common to pagan Europe, including the use of later Christian symbols such as the fish and the cross. This allows Keane to perpetrate the most daring ante-datings of edifices [... N]ot only does the Astartification of “Molly Asthore” [i.e., its phoney derivation from the goddess Astarte] make a merry reappearance, but even Captain Rock [i.e., Roger O’Connor; q.v.] is among the authorities.
[Quotes:] ‘I am aware that [Roger] O’Connor’s Chronicles of Eri is not looked upon as good authority by learned archaeologists, and that some suppose it to have been a composition by Mr O’Connor himself. But to my mind the early portion of it bears internal evidence of authenticity as an ancient composition. I believe it to be the work of Olam Fodla [...].’ (O’Neill, op. cit., 1867, p.37n.; Leerssen, 1996, p.138.)
Note: Leerssen notes in addition that many of the unprinted illustrations for Petrie’s Ecclesiastical Architecture (1845) turned up in this work by another RIA member within a year of his [Petrie’s; q.v.] death, giving it an unmeritedly sumptuous and imposing appearance.
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Notes
Get-rich post-famine purchases were facilitated by the Incumbered Estates (Ireland) Act 1849 which permitted the Encumbered Estates' Court to arrange the sale of estates in debt and to pay owner and creditors from the proceeds while producing a clear title for the new buyer, waiving any entail on the property designed to prevent its sale away from the ownership of the legal heir as established previously under the Entail Act which governed much of landed property in the United Kingdom. The use of trusts to protect properties from sale was likewise by-passed by the Act.
Belfast Central Public Library holds a copy of The Towers and Temples of Ancient Ireland (1867) which was first noticed in RICORSO prior to and independently of the encounter with either Leerssen (1996) or James Quinn (2009) - both cited here.
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