Qualla: Macroom Town Hall

Macroom Town Hall: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Macroom Town Hall: Commissioned by McCarthys, Sold at Auction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 a...

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Macroom Town Hall: The Codrum House Raid

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 a...

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Macroom Town Hall: From Market House to Town Hall

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Ch...

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Macroom Town Hall: A Bomb Through the Window

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 C...

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Macroom Town Hall: The Family, Mary Robinson, and the End of the Council

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 c...

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