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Updated: June 11, 2025
On the north side of Dingle Bay lies the estate of Lord Ventry, a popular landlord I am told, for the reason that he has not "harassed his tenants" with improvements, nor sought to wipe out the effect of the old middleman style of mismanagement by reducing their number and forcing them to live in habitations better perhaps than they care for.
An incident connected with one of the earliest private carriages in Kerry is worth telling. The vehicle in question had just been purchased by a certain Miss Mullins, daughter of a former Lord Ventry, who regarded it on its arrival with almost sacred awe.
Among old time Irish members, Joe Ronayne, M.P. for Cork, was among the most diverting. He was a railway contractor, and much wanted some additional ground at the terminus of the line, which the proprietor, Lord Ventry, would not sell. The size of the coveted patch was only seven feet long by three broad. Mr. Ronayne grimly retorted:
Almost the earliest of the private soup-kitchens for the relief of the sufferers was that opened at Dingle under the joint initiative of Lady Ventry, Mrs. Hickson, my future mother-in-law, and Mrs. Hussey, my mother. So as not to pauperise the people, subscriptions of one penny a week were asked from every house in the town.
They'd bore up against it so far, but the minute she was clear o' the Skelligs she fair tucked up her skirts an' ran for it by Dunmore Head. Wow, she rolled! "'She'll be makin' Smerwick, says Bell. "She'd ha' tried for Ventry by noo if she meant that, I said. "'They'll roll the funnel oot o' her, this gait, says Bell. 'Why canna Bannister keep her head to sea? "It's the tail-shaft.
In the Carew Manuscript it is recorded that he estimated that one constable and six men would suffice for Cork, but for Ventry, 'a large harbour near Dingle, one constable and fifty men were necessary; so he evidently had a clear apprehension of the villainous capabilities of the men of Kerry.
And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says the citizen, clapping his thigh, our harbours that are empty will be full again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with a fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O'Reillys and the O'Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with the emperor Charles the Fifth himself.
Dingle was the only town in this barony, and it was incorporated by Queen Elizabeth in 1585, when she granted it the same privileges which were enjoyed by Drogheda, with a superiority over the harbours of Ventry and Smerwick. The Virgin Sovereign also presented the town with £300 for the purpose of making a wall round it.
At Dingle Lady Ventry and her helpers were denounced from the pulpits as 'benevolent sisters bent on superising the poor' to superise being the improvised verb for Protestantising, a thing they decidedly did not attempt. A very early instance of the open-air cure never before recorded took place at Lismore.
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