November 2008

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Bowen’s Court, Elizabeth Bowen’s haunting memoir of her family’s ‘Big House’ in Co. Cork, ends with an evocation of the ‘perpetuity of livingness’; Bowen’s Court is destroyed, the contents moved to England, yet it is still ‘in its silent way, very much alive’. Differing fates have befallen the mansions built by Cork’s gentry and merchants during the city’s heyday, the decades on either side of 1800 when the great natural harbour was one of the most important ports for the Atlantic trade. Overlooking the city once stood Woodhill, described by William West in 1810 as the ‘Irish Vatican’ – exaggeration and campanilismo are not unknown in Ireland’s second city.1 Sadly, like Bowen’s Court, it is gone, but its spirit at least has been recaptured, as a large part of the collection formed by the Quaker merchant Cooper Penrose has returned from England to be unveiled in Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery. In a parallel and equally welcome development, Fota House, just outside the city, will soon be home to the collection assembled with great scholarship by a more recent Cork businessman, Richard Wood.

Bowen’s tone of elegiac nostalgia may sit uneasily with Revenue officials in Dublin and the hard-nosed merchants of Cork today, but these two groups have come together to rescue the heritage of Cork’s great houses with enlightened donations under Ireland’s tax credit scheme. Section 1003A of the 2006 Finance Act allows for full tax relief to the donor of a work of art categorised as ‘an outstanding example of the type of item involved, pre-eminent in its class, whose export from the State would constitute a diminution of the accumulated cultural heritage of Ireland or whose import into the State would constitute a significant enhancement of the accumulated cultural heritage of Ireland’. This definition has been applied somewhat elastically in the past, but these recent donations by the Mooney family to the Crawford and the McCarthys to Fota fully justify the provision’s generosity.

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