Ballyhest is situated in a part of Ireland that had been fought over for many centuries. It was ruled by the Earls of Desmond before the Plantation of Munster by Queen Elizabeth dating from about 1580.

The Battle of Kinsale in 1601 saw the end of the Irish chieftains’ control of most of the island ofIreland, and in 1647 a major battle was fought at Knocknanuss, less than a mile from Ballyhest, between the Irish Confederate army who supported the Royalist side in the English Civil War and the Parliamentarians who had deposed King Charles. Although the battle only lasted about threehours it was said to have been the bloodiest battle of the English Civil War leaving over 5,000 dead. Cromwell landed in Ireland in 1649 and proceeded to slaughter, starve or displace a significant percentage of the native Irish population. He also enacted the Penal Laws which were designed to subdue or preferably eliminate the Irish Catholic population.

In 1666, John Chinnery of Mallow was granted the Castle Cor estate and other lands, including the family farm at Ballyhest, in the parish of Kilbrin amounting to 1,673 acres, situated between the county towns of Mallow and Kanturk in North Cork. Chinnery had been a quartermaster in Cromwell’s army and the grant of land was probably a form of back pay for his service. In about 1700 Chinnery sold the Castle Cor estate to William Freeman.

Cartographer Dr Charles Smith, in 1750, writes about Castle Cor as follows:

Castlecorith, now Castle Cor, two miles north of Loghort, the seat of William Freeman, Esq., is a handsome house, fronted with hewn stone, and flanked at each angle with turrets, and near it is a pleasant park, where are the remains of an ancient fortification, in the midst of which stood a castle of the Barrys.

The Field Book of 1840 describes the Castle Cor area as:

…a townland of great extent. All a wooded and ornamental demesne, in the midst of which stands a gentleman’s seat, called Castle Cor House. It contains three Danish forts, a mined church, a graveyard, constructed by Protestants or for Protestant use. An old cave called Paulnacoth, near the side of an old abbey.

Despite the suffering widely caused by the Penal Laws, there were instances of compassion shown to the native Irish Catholic population. James Roderick O’Flanagan, in The Munster Circuit: Tales, Trials and Traditions, published in 1880, gives the following account of the kindness enacted by William Freeman in this period:

It is very pleasant to have to record many acts of kindness evinced by Protestants towards Catholic friends and neighbours during the penal days, such as the following. A Catholic gentleman of the county of Kerry, named Duggan, having noticed that a Discoverer (Popish Discoveres) was about taking proceedings to deprive him of his estate, was informed by a Protestant friend of high position in the County of Cork — Mr.Freeman, of Castle Cor — that he (Mr. Freeman) was willing to take the initiative in such proceedings, and thus save the property for Mr. Duggan, which that gentleman heard with gratitude.

In the 1770s Edward Deane, son of Joseph Deane and Jane Freeman, inherited the land of his mother’s family, and took the additional name of Freeman. The estate later provided important infrastructure to the local coalmining industry. Reverend Horatio Townsend, writing in 1810 about the coal pits near Kanturk that were serviced by the weir of the estate, records in the Statistical Survey of County Cork:

An attempt to commence a new and improved mode of working these collieries has been reserved for the enlightened and liberal mind of Edward Deane Freeman, Esq., and it could not be confided to better hands. Some of the best pits are upon his estate, to the south-west of Kanturk, and about eight miles from his residence, Castlecor. Under the direction of an experienced artist, he has just erected, at considerable expense, a large water- wheel, to work the pumps necessary for discharging the water of the pits. In this case the miners will have the advantage of working upwards, as well as laterally, the difficulty lessening as they proceed...

Edward Deane-Freeman was by all accounts a benign landlord whose compassion allowed his tenants to survive the Great Famine of the 1840s. The farm at Ballyhest was originally part of the Castle Cor estate, and the tenancy at this time was held by Joseph O’Reilly (1785–1865), who we know had at least three children with Ellen Roche (1790–1865): John Joseph, Elizabeth and Patrick.

Grandparents

Michael O’Reilly’s grandfather, John Joseph O’Reilly (1816–1887), is undoubtedly the patriarch of the modern O’Reilly family, and first comes to our attention on 21 April 1848 with the baptism of his son Richard. John Joseph subsequently married Richard’s mother Ellen Hennigan (1820–1858) on 8 February 1849. Ellen went on to bear six more children, Joseph, Thomas John, Ellen, Mary, John and Patrick beforeshe died at the age of 38.

Following Ellen’s passing, John Joseph was left with seven children under the age of 10. Six years later, at the age of 48, he married Kate Twomey (1828–1908) and together they had another five children: William, Michael, Catherine, Elizabeth and Maurice.

When John Joseph died in 1887, his eldest son William took over the running of the farm. By this time the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881 had transformed the relationship between landlord and tenant, so the O’Reilly family was now in a much more secure position with security of tenure at Ballyhest.

Parents and early childhood

William O’Reilly (1865–1929) met Catherine Healy (1873–1944), the daughter of Tom Healy and Julia Buckley, in Glantane, Kilshannig, in 1901, and together they had eight children at Ballyhest, seven of whom survived into adulthood: John (1902–1902), May (1903–1941), Tom (1904–1974),44 John Joseph (1907–1973), Kitty (1908–1931), Michael (1911–1963), Lil (1913–1984), and Ann (1918–2009).

Michael’s early childhood was spent in a busy and prosperous household. The family had the security of tenure, and received good prices for their produce. In addition, they likely received remittance money from the extended family who had emigrated to the US and Australia. Prices for agricultural producewere strong and the merchants in Cork had a steady market from provisioning the Royal Navy, the transatlantic steamships and the growing British markets. The outbreak of the first world war in 1914 led to increased demand and better prices. At this time, the O’Reilly farm consisted of about 55 acres of fertile limestone land with the Awbeg river running around two sides of the perimeter. The average farm size in Ireland at the turn of the 20th century was 34 acres while the average in Munster was 47 acres, so the O’Reilly holding was slightly above-average size with land of excellent quality.

The family would have been considered to be well off by the standards of the time, evidenced by all children attending secondary school, but it was by no means an easy life. Growing up, there was no electric light – the country was dark. There was no electricity or machinery, and there was a lot of manual labour involved in farming. Every bucket of water had to be carried from a hand-operated pump down the road and the horse was the only source of motive power or transport. The farming operations were a mixture of dairy and subsistence: pigs, poultry and home-grown vegetables would have provided a plentiful supply of plain but healthy food, while oats would have been grown to feed the horses, and hay would be saved for both cattle and horses. Income was generated by the dairy-farming activity, and Ballyhest had one considerable advantage due to the construction of a creamery just across theroad during the 1890s: transporting the churns of fresh milk with a donkey and cart took only minutes whereas other farmers could spend half the day travelling to and from the creamery. If any ofthe family ever wanted to go to Cork, they’d take the pony and trap to Kanturk station.

The farm at Ballyhest has been run continuously by descendants of John Joseph O’Reilly and throughout this time it has survived as a tenable endeavour, even when in 1930s Ireland the farmers’ market was cut off from the British market due to tariffs imposed in response to De Valera’s isolationist government.

Sixty years on from Michael’s death in 1963 he would have been amazed and gratified to see the advances in educational opportunity that are available to his descendants. He would also have been very proud to see the academic achievements of his own children and those of the wider O’Reilly clan.