Shanbally was commissioned around 1812 for Cornelius O'Callaghan, 1st Viscount Lismore. The architect chosen was John Nash, then at the peak of his Regency career and about to begin work for the Prince Regent in London. Nash designed Shanbally as a vast neo-Gothic country house on the south slope of the Galtee Mountains near Clogheen in south Tipperary. It became his largest Irish commission - bigger than his work at Lough Cutra in Galway or Caerhays in Cornwall. Of the three churches he built in Ireland, one stands in nearby Cahir. He worked across the region. The 1st Viscount kept Shanbally as his principal seat until his death in 1857, breeding fine-wooled sheep on the Galty slopes around the house. His successor, the 2nd Viscount, lost both his sons. When he died in 1898 the viscountcy ended with him. Shanbally passed by inheritance, through a long chain of Butler relations, to Lady Beatrice and Lady Constance Butler - the Lismore widow's death in 1900 completing the transfer.

On 3 May 1904 Lady Beatrice and her husband Lt. Gen. Sir Reginald Pole-Carew, with Lady Constance, hosted Edward VII, Queen Alexandra, and Princess Victoria at Shanbally. The royal party were touring south Munster country houses on a circuit that took them between Shanbally and Lismore Castle, stopping at the Mulcahy family's Ardfinnan Woollen Mills along the way. Shanbally in 1904 was at its peak. The estate ran into thousands of acres. The 2nd Viscount had been an agricultural improver - his sheep, cross-bred from imported merinos and South Downs with the native mountain stock of the Galtees, were prized in Ireland for their fine wool and their resistance to foot-rot in the wet climate. His flock of 915 sheep supplied the Ardfinnan Woollen Mills with fleece from the 1870s onwards. The house and the land worked together: industrial cloth, agricultural innovation, royal hospitality, all braided into one long Anglo-Irish project.

By the 1940s the great houses of Anglo-Irish Ireland were in trouble. Maintenance was unaffordable. Servants were difficult to find. The Land Commission was breaking up estates across the country. In December 1946 Country Life Magazine carried an advertisement for Shanbally: 9 reception rooms, 14 bedrooms, 6 dressing rooms, servants' quarters, central heating, telephone and electricity, with thousands of acres of shooting rights attached. The owner was the Shanbally Estate Company. The price was for long-term rental. A year later, in December 1947, the figures had grown: 8 reception rooms, 28 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, 7,000 acres of shooting. The advertisement now suggested the house might suit a country club or hotel. Nobody bit. Lady Constance died in 1949, Lady Beatrice in 1953. Lady Beatrice's son Major Patrick Pole-Carew sold to the Irish Land Commission during the 1950s. The Land Commission was not buying houses; it was buying land for redistribution. The house was an embarrassment.

For a moment in the late 1950s it looked as if Shanbally might be saved. Edward Charles Sackville-West, the 5th Baron Sackville - London theatre critic, novelist, and a child of the literary Sackville family that owned Knole in Kent - had loved the Clogheen area since boyhood. He agreed to buy the castle along with 163 acres. Then the Land Commission refused to stop felling trees on the land he intended to purchase. The estate's woods were being cleared by his prospective neighbours - the Irish state itself - even as he negotiated. He pulled out. Once that sale collapsed the Irish government claimed it could find no other suitable owner. The protests against demolition came from a small set of voices: the heritage organisation An Taisce, the academic Professor Gwynn, the Mitchelstown TD John W. Moher, and Senator Sean Moylan, the Minister for Agriculture until his death in November 1957. The Fianna Fail government had little interest in saving an ascendancy house. The local TD Michael Davern wanted it down.

The decision came in early 1960. In March, The Nationalist newspaper reported: "A big bang yesterday ended Shanbally Castle, where large quantities of gelignite and cortex shattered the building." The explosion was heard ten miles away. The Irish government issued a statement: "Apart from periods of military occupation the castle remained wholly unoccupied for 40 years." Forty years was, of course, exactly what they had presided over. Nothing was salvaged. The stones - Nash's careful neo-Gothic limestone - went for road metal and rubble fill. The 7,000 acres were divided. The site today is forestry; you can walk what was once the demesne and find a few cut stones in the undergrowth. The story of Shanbally became a turning point in Irish attitudes to country houses: the moment when the conscious, deliberate destruction of John Nash's largest Irish building by the state itself shamed enough people that the next great houses - Carton, Castletown, Lyons - would mostly survive. Shanbally itself did not. The explosion was final.