Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh was a 19 century Landlord who was born with no legs or arms, and yet was an expert horseman, a first class shot, a noted yachtsman, an active local Justice of the Peace and administrator, as well as a Member of Parliament. And all this before modern medicine had developed the prosthetic limb.
Having no arms below the lower third of his upper arm and nor legs below mid
thigh, he had no hands and no feet. Had he been born into a small farmer’s family, or a labourer’s, or boot maker’s, he would probably have spent his life perched on the doorstep gazing up and down the street and chatting with sympathetic passersby. But he wasn’t. This baby, so unfortunate in his misshapen body, had had the good fortune to be born into one of the wealthiest
families in Ireland.
Arthur’s mother, Lady Harriet, was his father’s second wife, married in middle age after the death of his first wife. Lady Harriet was a Protestant and was to have
four children, a girl and three boys. Arthur, the baby born on Friday March 1831, was the youngest one. All of them were brought up in the knowledge that they
were aristocrats and landlords, and as such had a duty to look after those who were less fortunate.
Arthur was born in Borris House, Borris, in County Carlow, on the 25 of March 1831. In the wider world outside the family home, the Roman Catholic Relief Act three years beforehand had finally allowed Catholics to become Members of Parliament. Most of the other restrictions had already been brought to an end, and now there remained only the Tithe Act, itself due to go in six more years.
In spite of his name and his heritage as the heir to the Kings of Munster making him one of the Five Bloods, the remains of the ancient Irish nobility, he was a
Protestant because his father had converted to Protestantism to enable him to be an MP, long before the Relief Act. In fact the distinctions between Protestant and Catholic were far less important in his father’s day than they would become in Arthur’s.
By 25 March 1853, his 22nd birthday, his father and two elder brothers had died, and so quite unexpectedly he was Squire of Borris. However it was a Borris beset
by creditors. And debtors, but they were mostly penniless tenants. The Great Famine had been hard on them, though nowhere near as hard as in the west of Ireland, but all the same rents had fallen sadly behind. Many landlords were simply evicting defaulting tenants, and as often as not ploughing up their smallholdings and planting grain. Before the famine there had been nearly eight million people in Ireland. Many of the lucky but now landless tenants, some two million of them, had emigrated to England or America. The unlucky, at least one and a half million, just died by the roadside. But to evict starving tenants had never been an option for the Kavanaghs. Instead they had fed them. Arthur realised that work was needed urgently. Money was short, but much could be done without money. In India he had learned draftsmanship, and there was timber a-plenty at Borris. What was needed was a sawmill and the other necessaries of building – bricks, mortar, slates. So he designed the houses himself (and won a prize from the Royal Dublin Society for the best designed houses at the lowest cost) and he erected a sawmill. He must have charmed the funds for the building materials and perhaps the mill itself from friends, for within a short time a transformation was taking place, and the village of Borris much as we see it today was being born.