Step into West Square in Macroom and the building facing the castle gatehouse looks unremarkable enough: a symmetrical Victorian frontage of five bays, the end bays projected forward as pavilions, a slightly recessed round-headed doorway with a clock above it, twin external staircases climbing to a first-floor balcony. Albert William Barnard designed it. Buckley Bros of Ovens built it. It cost the urban district council 1,320 pounds and opened in late 1904. But the building has been here, in different forms, since 1620. It has hosted markets, courts, executions, a school, a billiard room bombed by the IRA, a presidential sculpture unveiling, and the slow administrative business of one Irish town for more than four hundred years.
The original market house went up in 1620, commissioned by the McCarthy family who held Macroom Castle directly opposite. The MacCarthys had built the town around the castle since the 14th century and used markets and fairs to draw trade. The market house was the administrative anchor. In 1703, with the MacCarthy estate forfeited after the Williamite war, much of the family's Macroom property was sold at auction to the Hollow Sword Blades Company, a speculative London outfit that had picked up vast tracts of confiscated Irish land. The company resold the market house and surrounding property to Judge Francis Bernard, founder of the Bandon dynasty. It passed down through the Earls of Bandon. Queen Anne confirmed the right to hold markets in 1713.
On 19 April 1799, a militia party of fifteen United Irishmen led by Malachi Duggan raided Codrum House, the local home of Colonel Robert Hutchinson of the Muskerry Blue Light Dragoons. The raid was meant to seize weapons. It went wrong. Hutchinson was shot. The fifteen men were arrested and tried for murder. Three were found guilty, sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, with their remains placed on spikes above the market house. The punishment was the maximum the law allowed for treasonous murder, and it was carried out as written. The dismembered bodies of three men hung above the building that hosted the town's markets, a deliberate piece of public terror at the height of the United Irishmen rebellion. They were people with names and families. Their executioners wanted everybody in Macroom to look up and see what happened to anyone who took up arms against the Crown.
The 1620 building grew dilapidated and was rebuilt in rubble masonry around 1820. By the late 19th century, the town commissioners, appointed under the Towns Improvement Act of 1854, decided to convert the old market house into a proper municipal hall. The landowner was Olivia Charlotte Guinness, Baroness Ardilaun, born in Macroom Castle in 1850 and now married into the Guinness brewing dynasty. She agreed to make the site available. In 1899 the town commissioners were replaced by an urban district council. The new council took over the conversion. Albert William Barnard drew the plans; Buckley Bros built it; the round-headed doorway with its voussoirs and the bi-partite windows on the first floor were finished by the end of 1904. The clock above the entrance has been keeping the time of Macroom for more than a century.
In March 1921, during the Irish War of Independence, a unit of Auxiliary Division cadets was resting in the billiard room at the back of the town hall when Irish Volunteers threw a bomb through the window. The cadets were slightly injured. Macroom was the main Auxiliary base in Cork during the war, and the town hall, with its central location on the square opposite the castle they used, was an obvious target. The bombing did not kill anybody but it did serve notice. After the war, a memorial in the form of a cross on a pedestal was unveiled southwest of the town hall to commemorate Irish Republican Army volunteers who had fought in the conflict. It still stands. The billiard room is gone.
In 1933 a new boys' school, De La Salle College, opened in temporary accommodation inside the town hall and stayed there until a permanent building was completed off New Street three years later. The town hall continued as the urban district council's seat through the twentieth century. On 24 February 1996, President Mary Robinson unveiled a sculpture called The Family, depicting two parents and their two children, on the site. A small shield commemorating her visit was installed on the front of the building. Two years later, a second shield went up to commemorate the award of the Freedom of the Town to the financier Dermot Desmond on 21 June 1998. The urban district council ran the building until 2002, then handed it to a successor town council. In 2014, under the Local Government Reform Act, the town council was dissolved and administration was amalgamated with Cork County Council. After four centuries on the square, the building is no longer a seat of local government. But the County Council still uses it for the delivery of local services, and the clock still strikes the hour above West Square.
Located at 51.90 degrees N, 8.96 degrees W on West Square in central Macroom, directly opposite the surviving Macroom Castle gatehouse. Cork Airport (EICK) lies about 38 km east. The building sits in the historic town centre on the east bank of the River Sullane, in a small square framed by the gatehouse to the west and a row of 19th-century commercial buildings on the other sides. From altitude at 1,500-3,000 feet, look for the small open square just inland from the river bridge in the heart of Macroom town; the town hall is the symmetrical five-bay building forming the east side of the square.