Qualla: Kilrush

Kilrush: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Edge, CC BY-SA 2.0. There is a 1,500-year-old monastic settlement on a small island a quarter of an hour offshore by boat. There is a 120-berth marina with automatic lock gates. There is a Heritage Town designation, an annual famine commemoration, and a colony of bottlenose dolphins that live in the estuary year-round and let tourists come and look at them. There is also, less photogenically, the memory of the Vandeleur evictions of the 1880s, when one of Ireland's most notorious landlord families turned an already broken County Clare town into a national scandal. Kilrush, near the mouth of the River Shannon in southwest County Clare, has worn all these identities over four hundred years.

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Image: Steve Edge | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kilrush: From Dutch to Landlord

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnArmagh, Public domain. The Vandeleurs arrived in Ireland from the Netherlands in the 17th century. By around 1656, Giles Vandeleur was settled as a tenant to the Earl of Thomond at Ballynote near Kilrush. His son was made prebend - a clerical position in the Church of Ireland - in 1687 and was buried a...

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Image: JohnArmagh | Public domain

Kilrush: The Steamboat Age

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Huguet, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Napoleonic Wars improved agricultural prices, and Kilrush boomed. A Scottish businessman named James Paterson - formerly a Royal Navy gunboat lieutenant until 1802 - moved to Kilrush and became Vandeleur's right hand in the town's development. Paterson built a six-storey buil...

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Image: Simon Huguet | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kilrush: Famine and Eviction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DGD-M, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Great Famine of 1845-1849 hit West Clare devastatingly hard. Potato blight destroyed the staple crop. Fever and cholera followed. The Kilrush Poor Law Union workhouse, designed to hold 800, was holding more than 3,000 by 1849, with deaths recorded in the dozens every week. Ca...

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Image: DGD-M | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilrush: Scattery Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Huguet, CC BY-SA 2.0. Out in the Shannon estuary, about fifteen minutes by boat from the marina, lies Scattery Island. In Irish it is Inis Cathaigh - the island of Cathach, a monster St. Senan is said to have driven into the sea before founding his monastery here in the 6th century. The monastic settl...

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Image: Simon Huguet | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kilrush: Moneypoint and the Power Cut

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NearEMPTiness, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1979, construction began on Moneypoint Power Station, 5 km west of Kilrush on the Shannon estuary - Ireland's largest electricity generating station and its only coal-fired plant. When commissioned between 1985 and 1987, Moneypoint employed hundreds of people directly and many...

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Image: NearEMPTiness | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilrush: Dolphins and a Gold Medal

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Velela, Public domain. What Kilrush has now is the dolphins. A resident pod of around 200 bottlenose dolphins lives in the Shannon estuary year-round, one of the few resident dolphin populations in Europe. Dolphin-watching tour boats run daily from the marina. The Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundatio...

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Image: Velela | Public domain