'During the court case, the heart went out of the place' – Inside Lissadell House: the next generation

‘Happiness is having a large happy family, in another city,” said comedian George Burns. However, Constance Cassidy and Eddie Walsh, owners of Lissadell House, would be more inclined to agree with Mitch Albom, who said: “Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.”

Constance and Eddie have seven children, now all in their late teens and 20s, and they are getting ready to gradually hand over the reins of Lissadell to their offspring. They’re starting with a house on the estate, renovated and kitted out with the help of their children, particularly their daughter, Constance (called Baby by all other family members).

“This is their venture,” says Constance Senior. “The reason this started is to make Lissadell self-sustaining. There is no point in having it as a heavy burden, it has to be self-reliant.”

Those of us who like to read the property pages – who like to indulge in a bit of property porn, if you will – marvel at the enormous old piles in the country that can be snapped up for next to nothing compared to the price of a semi-d in Dublin, and we briefly dream of selling up and owning a modern-day mini-Downton.

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But that’s all we ever allow it to be, a fleeting dream, knowing the money pits these places usually turn out to be. Dealing with leaky roofs, dry rot and damp is not for the faint-hearted, and it’s only the likes of lionhearts Eddie and Constance who should ever take on such projects.

And Eddie and Constance did just that in 2003 when they bought Lissadell, despite already having a perfectly lovely home of their own, a not insubstantial period house in Kildare.

As anyone who did the Leaving Cert knows, Lissadell is a house with such historical significance, it practically embodies the spirit of Ireland; it was the home of Countess Constance Markievicz (nee Gore-Booth), one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, and it was where WB Yeats wrote much of his poetry.

At the time they bought Lissadell, there was something utterly romantic about the notion of the young couple – the young woman actually named Constance, like the Countess herself – and their sizeable family breathing life into this tumbledown place.

Eddie says now he did it for pragmatic reasons – to be a cushion in later years. “As barristers, we have no goodwill to sell when we stop, so no business to give the children. You only get an income as long as you’re performing,” he says, adding, “I practised down here, so when Lissadell came on the market, I thought, ‘That’s an incredible place, it could be an incredible tourist venture; it’s worth looking at; it could be there for the children in the long term, and it’s something to focus on’.”

The estate comprised so much that size alone would prove daunting for the average investor, but not Eddie. “I came from a farming background anyway, so the idea of a 418-acre estate was something good. Then there was the association with the Gore-Booths, and particularly Constance. There’s also the Yeats association – it just had everything to recommend it,” Eddie says. “We paid €3.75m, but there were houses in Dublin, relatively ordinary houses, going for that type of money, and we bought this with the intention of having a business.”

In addition, both Constance and Eddie felt a strong personal connection to the area. “We had family holidays in Strandhill in Sligo when I was a child,” says Constance. She adds: “Because Eddie practised in Sligo as a barrister, not only did he know Lissadell well but he knew the two ladies, Miss Aideen and Miss Gabrielle Gore-Booth. They lived in penury – to make ends meet, they showed the house to the public from 1965.”

Eddie adds: “Miss Aideen was a lovely old lady. I remember meeting her and she asked me was I down for the assizes [a court which sat at intervals]. I didn’t tell her that word was gone out with the British.”

Eddie and Constance did restore the wonderful old house built of local cut-grey limestone, which stands in a magical setting on the shores of Sligo Bay, and the extensive grounds around it. They had fun doing it, enlisting the help of their seven children, at the time aged from the early teens to babies.

“We bought this when the children were small. They said, ‘Our friends are here in Dublin’, but I just knew the only way we’d get anything done was if we all did it together,” says Constance, who oozes dynamism and spirit, probably not unlike the original Constance of Lissadell.

“All the holidays and three weekends out of every four we had to go to Lissadell – that was the way we did it, and they loved it,” she adds.

Not only did they restore the house but also all the buildings, the walkways, and the garden, one of which is a two-and-a-half-acre alpine garden. “The garden hadn’t been touched since 1920. Eddie was told it would take him 10 years to get it even remotely resembling what it had looked like. It didn’t take him 10 years. If you ever say anything like that to Eddie, he regards it as a challenge – it took him two years,” Constance says admiringly.

“The children were very small, they were all here, getting stuck in, picking up stones,” adds Constance, whom you can be certain brooked no nonsense from any of them. Constance Junior adds: “It was so funny, we’d all be serving people in the tearooms and in the shop, and there I’d be, 12 [years old], and the people would be like, ‘Is someone proper here?'”

There was a terrible period for the family from 2008 to 2013 when the couple were locked in a bitter dispute with Sligo County Council over a right of way, and during that time, they hardly went near the house. “The heart went out of Lissadell for us. The High Court went against us in 2010, and during that time, I didn’t see any point wasting time on it,” says Eddie. “Unless we succeeded in reversing it, Lissadell was finished.”

They did succeed in reversing it, but Eddie was still loath to go back, and only agreed to do so when his daughter Elanor begged to have her 21st there.

Constance Junior takes up the story again.”I remember, Dad sat all us kids down and asked us what we all wanted, ‘All the stuff that is going on, all that’s still going on, what would you guys like to do?’ We all decided, ‘We love Lissadell and we want to keep going’.”

Constance Senior says, “Looking back, after the court case, I was asked, ‘Would you go through that again?’ and I said, ‘No it was too hard’. But I am a very optimistic person, and I regret nothing I have done.”

So since winning the court case, it’s been onwards and upwards, with royal visits – Charles and Camilla were there in 2015 – and hugely successful rock concerts; they loved Leonard Cohen so much that they’ve named a garden after him.

They have daily tours during their season, and turned some of the old buildings into gorgeous tearooms serving breakfasts and lunches, with lots of home-made goodies. The shop sells books about Lissadell, and much else relating to the house and the area, and the literary figures associated with it.

And, as usual, the kids all got stuck in, selling, serving, doing tours. “You know what, it was the best learning you could get,” says Constance Junior. “To meet people in that way. Now none of us struggle with it. Harry is gone off to be a barrister doing motions before the courts and he has no problem, and Kate is doing presentations every day. It teaches you hard work, seeing Ma and Dad getting up early and getting stuff done. It worked so well for me, because I’m in love with this place.”

The family’s latest project – the first one in which the kids have a real stake – is the renovation of the manager’s house, which they are calling Lissadell on the Beach.

They had done basic work on this little house before the court case – roofing, insulation and renovation of the exterior stonework. This year, it was time to tackle it properly, and they decided to put young Constance in charge – with the rest of them helping her – mainly because she is so keen.

So they appointed her the estate and events coordinator, and she has big plans. Deciding to put in classy accommodation was an obvious choice. “A lot of people came to Ma and Dad over the years and asked, ‘Have you anywhere to stay with these views?’ so it kind of came to me that we need to have rentals. It came to me this was the nicest place with the prettiest views, and to go from there,” says Constance Junior.

The house has an extraordinary setting – it’s almost on the beach, it overlooks Drumcliff and Strandhill, and it is surrounded by the stunning alpine garden – all-in-all, a huge selling point.

“When we first saw this house – the manager’s house – I thought about perhaps Yeats, Markievicz and AE having a little chat and sipping a glass of wine and looking out at Drumcliff Bay and Strandhill. The lifebuoy was painted by Yeats,” Constance Senior muses. “Everything you see reflects the sea.”

However, as she also acknowledges, it does rain a lot in Sligo, so she decided a key thing should be the views from inside. They installed windows wherever possible, even in the loos. And if guests tire of those views – however unlikely that is – the walls are covered in paintings from Eddie’s collection of landscapes, depicting Irish maritime scenes painted by well-known British and Irish artists, whether contemporary or from the past. These include works by Gore-Booth and Markievicz family artists.

The ground floor consists of a kitchen, a living room, a study and a bathroom, while upstairs, there are two bedrooms, both en suite, and a bathroom for general use – it sounds basic and ordinary enough, but nothing is ordinary about any of these rooms.

Thought and much discussion has gone into every detail of the decor, every chair, every cushion. And coming up with their eventual colour scheme – muted tones with hints of blue, for the seaside location. “We all have such different taste,” says young Constance, while her mother insists: “We didn’t have one fight.”

And no expense has been spared. All the walls are painted in Farrow & Ball paints, while the curtains are mainly made of William Morris design fabric.

Presenting the best of Irish was a key objective, and Eddie says they were helped in this by three Irish companies. Evelyn Mahaffey of Stylish Living helped them to source the beds; they got a lot of antiques from Mervyn Blanc of Yeats Country Antiques (as well as borrowing some from Lissadell), and they got fireplaces and other items from Wilson’s in the North.

“We thought long and hard about whether to mix old and modern, but we decided to go for it. Eddie was more interested in the period pieces, Elanor, Kate and Baby thought comfort was more important, ” says Constance. “So it’s a good mix, with a lot of modern, comfortable sofas,” she says, adding that the heating is geothermal, which ups the comfort levels.

Eddie, who is never not working – while the women chat, he has a brush in his hand, sweeping leaves around the exterior of the house – had huge imput too. He designed the stained glass in the internal doors – the design is that of the Celtic lovers’ knot. He cleaned the oak floors and stained them with lye. Not to be outdone, Constance Senior claims she cleaned all the fenders, saying, “I was down on my bended knees for two days with a wire brush.” As well as his collection of paintings, Eddie has lent some of his collections of Waterford Glass and Royal Doulton.

A lot of debate went into the make-up of the kitchen, which is a mix of old and cutting edge. The old is the furniture. “The kitchen is a memorial to the Titanic. The material in the table, benches and panelling are from the pump room at Harland and Wolff – we got it through Wilson’s,” says Eddie, who also insisted on a Lacanche stove.

“My pride and joy,” he says. “We brought it in specifically from Burgundy. It took four months, and it’s electric and gas. Professional cooks love gas. I dislike gas, I prefer electric, but it’s a compromise as Constance sees herself as a professional cook,” he says with a laugh.

According to Constance Senior, Elanor’s contributions to the kitchen decor were the rose-gold Smeg toaster, kettle and coffee maker, whereas for Constance Junior, the surround-sound here and throughout the house was vital for their potential guests, whom they imagine will be mainly Americans and Yeats enthusiasts.

Constance Junior is in charge from now on and thrilled to be. “I just finished my law degree, got the 2.1, and I was thinking about what to do, but I realised that every summer after a whole year of doing the law, all I ever wanted was to be here. The second I finished my exams, I wanted to be here.”

She has huge plans; she will not only oversee the renting of this lovely house but also the management of the tours of Lissadell and the shop and cafe. She and Eddie are also planning to build a secret garden – both love gardening, and in keeping with the times, she is hoping to make things generally more sustainable.

“We’re trying to do things as eco-friendly as possible, everything plastic-free,” she enthuses, full of plans. “It’s not work for me because I’m obsessed with this place, I’m very interested in events, I’m trying to push on with them, but also, along with the more luxurious accommodation, I’m hoping to do geodesic bubble domes.

She goes on to explain: “I want a large, wide-open space for viewing the skies with maybe cabins, bubble domes, glass houses. I want an eco-friendly version; it’s definitely happening. If we were to have them for concerts it would be great. I’ve gone and visited other places that have them, but no actual place like Lissadell.”

But then, there is no place like Lissadell.

To rent Lissadell on the Beach, email helencassidyauctioneer.com or see premierpropertiesireland.com

Lissadell House, see lissadellhouse.com

Edited by Mary O’Sullivan

Photography by David Conachy

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