Enniscorthy, County Wexford

Castle And Athenaeum
1798: The Year Of The Hill
Pugin Cathedral
Nearly Zero Energy Building

¶ Both Wexford Town (home of Georgia Southern University’s Wexford Campus) and Enniscorthy, approximately 14 miles to the northwest, are on the River Slaney, whose name means “health.” Eighteenth-century poet Thomas Furlong, born near Enniscorthy, described the Slaney as “[d]eep, rapid, unrestrain’d, and strong.” Wexford Town is the county’s largest settlement, and Enniscorthy is its next largest. The communities are linked by road and rail.

Castle And Athenaeum

¶ Two significant buildings sit side-by-side amid the medieval streets of central Enniscorthy: the Castle and the Athenaeum.

Enniscorthy Castle

¶ Enniscorthy Castle overlooks a historic ford on the River Slaney, which ceases to be tidal upstream from Enniscorthy. On the opposite (eastern) bank of the Slaney from the castle lies the site of the sixth-century church and monastery of St. Senán.
¶ The mid-twelfth century brought the Normans to southeastern Ireland, primarily from Wales. As part of the invasion, the Cambro-Norman (or Welsh-Norman) Prendergast family acquired considerable lands in County Wexford, including the dubh thír (“black country”) around Enniscorthy. Anglicized as the Duffry, the territory’s name alludes to dense oak forests, now largely a memory.
¶ During its second generation in Ireland, the Prendergast family built the original Enniscorthy Castle, probably during the 1230s. Towards the end of the 1300s, the native-Irish McMurrough-Kavanagh family acquired the structure.
¶ After the Normans (sometimes called the “Old English”), the next significant invasion of Ireland was by forces loyal to Queen Elizabeth I of England’s Tudor dynasty. Under that regime (the “New English”), a new castle, which still stands, replaced what remained of the original one.
¶ Its builder was likely Englishman Sir Henry Wallop (c. 1540-1599), whose exploitation of the local oak woods boosted Enniscorthy’s economy. In addition to being a valuable commodity in itself, felled oak timber fueled an iron works, with the cleared land being developed for agriculture.
¶ Volume 6 of Philip Hore’s History of the Town and County of Wexford (1911) quotes Wallop as opining that the best approach to the Irish was “to daunt” them “by the edge of the sworde and … plant better [English people] in their place.”

¶ During the mid-seventeenth century, the Wallop family’s support for Oliver Cromwell saved Enniscorthy from serious incident as the English ruler and his New Model Army passed through en route to Wexford Town, whose port they sought to control. Between October 2 and 11 of 1649, Cromwell’s Sack of Wexford resulted in around 3,000 deaths. (The atrocity was the focus of “The Wexford Massacre, 1649,” a poem by the nineteenth-century Irish author Michael Joseph Barry, who published as “Brutus.” It was recited by fourth-grader Robert Strickland of Savannah’s Grammar Schools on Friday, April 27, 1883, during a city-wide inspection of publicly funded schools.)
¶ In time, the Wallops became absentee landlords (i.e. they chose to live in England), and the head of the family gained an English noble title: Earl of Portsmouth. Thus, the family’s 11,500 acres or so of land holdings around — plus its many built properties within — Enniscorthy were deemed the Portsmouth Estate.
¶ The Irish land campaign of the last quarter of the nineteenth century resulted in government-facilitated purchase schemes that effected a large-scale transfer of agricultural-land ownership from landlords, including the Wallops, to the native Irish who had been their tenants.
¶ As for Enniscorthy Castle: beginning in 1903, the local Roche family rented it as a residence from the Portsmouth Estate. Later, the Roches, who would marry into the American Shriver family, purchased the edifice. The malting of barley (for brewers, such as Guinness, and distillers, such as Power) emerged as a big business in Enniscorthy, and the town’s Roche Malting Plant helped pioneer the industry.

Eileen Grey

¶ Today, a single ticket grants access to both Enniscorthy Castle and the National 1798 Rebellion Center (see below). Spaces in the Castle have been configured to tell the town’s history, with one highlight being an exhibition about native daughter Eileen Gray (1878-1976), a leading modernist furniture designer and architect.
¶ Born in Brownswood House, near Enniscorthy, the self-taught Gray forged a considerable reputation in France, initially for for lacquered furniture and then for avant-garde but accessible, functional pieces, attentive to form and line.
¶ A pioneer of using chrome in furniture, she also — according to the National Museum of Ireland — embraced “aluminum, celluloid, tubular steel, bakelite, and cork.” For art and design courses seeking a “deep dive” into Eileen Gray, the installation at Enniscorthy Castle can be supplemented by a visit to the permanent exhibition devoted to her work at the National Museum’s Collins Barracks location in Dublin (Luas [tram] red line stop: Museum).
¶ Such courses will doubtless also find fascinating and useful Enniscorthy’s A.W.N. Pugin-designed Roman Catholic cathedral, discussed elsewhere on this webpage, regarded as a gem of the Gothic Revival philosophy and aesthetic.
¶ Gray’s commitment to scrupulous, dramatic interior design is manifest in Villa E-1027, the small, minimalist masterpiece of a summer home she created between 1926 and 1929 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, on the Mediterranean in southwest France.
¶ Students of women’s history find Gray’s career exemplary of professional challenges historically faced by women. A front-rank male modernist architect, Le Corbusier, actively attempted to thwart her progress in their common field.

The Athenaeum \ Easter 1916 Rising

¶ Located beside Enniscorthy Castle, the Antheaeum was constructed in 1892 as a community venue for education and, thanks to a small theater, entertainment. In late April 1916, it briefly served as a military headquarters, with the theater being used as a makeshift. hospital.
¶ On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, a coalition of Irish entities initiated a rebellion. The hope was to liberate the country from British colonial control by establishing a republic.
¶ While short-lived and unsuccessful, the effort — known as the Easter 1916 Rising — is regarded as precipitating the creation of the Irish Free State (1922), which later became the Republic of Ireland (1949).
¶ With its memory of the Battle of Vinegar Hill during the United Irish Rebellion of 1798, Enniscorthy emerged as the Easter Rising’s most important site of action outside Dublin.
¶ On Thursday, April 17, 1916, female rebels belonging to Cumann na mBan (“the women’s council”) and male rebels belonging to the Irish Volunteers took possession of the Athenaeum.
¶ Today, a portion of the venue contains a museum about the Easter 1916 Rising in Enniscorthy and environs.
¶ In addition to publicly reading the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the Enniscorthy rebels hoisted the green, white, and orange Irish tricolor flag over the Athenaeum.
¶ In Dublin on Saturday, April 29, 1916, Patrick Pearse (styled President of the Republic) surrendered to the British. However, the Enniscorthy-based rebels refused to relinquish their positions unless in physical possession of a surrender order from Pearse.
¶ Thus, the authorities escorted two men — Seamus Doyle and Seán Etchingham — from the Athenaeum to Pearse’s prison cell. After their return, Enniscorthy officially surrendered at midnight, as Monday, May 1, 1916, began.
¶ Enniscorthy was the last rebel stronghold to capitulate, permitting a couple of thousand British troops to enter the town. The majority of the 375 individuals arrested in County Wexford ended up incarcerated in a camp at Frongoch, Wales, until an amnesty declaration in late 1917.
¶ Journalist Robert Brennan, a native of Wexford Town, was among those in the Enniscorthy rebel leadership to receive a death sentence. However, as public opinion increasingly turned against execution, the penalty was reduced to penal servitude.
¶ From the village of Oylegate (between Wexford Town and Enniscorthy), Brennan’s wife, Úna Bolger Brennan, was a uniformed member of Cumann na mBan in the Athenaeum.
¶ Between 1934 and 1947, the Brennans lived in Washington, DC, where Robert served as the Irish Free State’s first minister (effectively, ambassador) to the United States. One of their daughters, Maeve Brennan, became a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar and, later, a social diarist and short story writer at The New Yorker. In recent years, her literary fame has grown.

¶ The Athenaeum is among several Enniscorthy venues that feature in the 2015 movie, Brooklyn, based on the 2009 novel of the same name by Colm Tóibín. Winner of multiple international literary awards, Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy. He supports such cultural endeavors in the town as the Wexford Literary Festival, usually held around the first weekend of July.
¶ We generally screen Brooklyn for American students attending GS’s Wexford Campus, for it interrogates cultural differences between its two settings: Brooklyn and Enniscorthy.
¶ Taking place in the 1950s, a decade of exceptionally high emigration from Ireland, it centers on Eilis Lacey (played by Saoirse Ronan) as she navigates a retail job, night school, and romance in Brooklyn, while experiencing the tug of family and friends in her hometown, Enniscorthy. For her performance in Brooklyn, Ronan received a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

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1798: The Year Of The Hill

¶ In Ireland, 1798 (or, simply, ’98) became known as the Year of the Hill, after Vinegar Hill, which overlooks the town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, and is discussed below. Due to widespread rebellion, that year remains the bloodiest in Irish history, and how the Irish — at home and abroad — have processed the trauma and commemorated the rebels constitutes a rich study.
¶ Beginning in May 1798 and continuing for most of the remainder of the year, the Society of the United Irishmen spearheaded a major martial campaign, the United Irish Rebellion, across most parts of the country.
¶ The rebellion configured as a series of complex events, with local grievances, sometimes sectarian in nature, informing elements of the action. However, the fundamental impetus was an aspiration to overthrow the British colonial regime and establish in its stead a sovereign Irish republic based on a commitment to equality, irrespective of citizens’ ancestry and/or religion.
¶ Enniscorthy is home to the multi-award-winning National 1798 Rebellion Center, which offers a self-guided experience of the rebellion, from origins to aftermath. A group tour with an academically qualified historian is also available upon request.
¶ By means of a variety of immersive installations (which you can preview on its website), the Center places the uprising in the context of Enlightenment discourses about self-government. For example: it presents a debate between Irishman Edmund Burke, author of the anti-revolution Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and Englishman Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Man (1791). Another highlight is The Longest Day: a 4-D interpretation of the Battle of Vinegar Hill, fought near and within Enniscorthy on midsummer’s day of 1798.
¶ At a minimum our educational field trip to Enniscorthy embraces both the National 1798 Rebellion Center and Vinegar Hill, whose summit affords panoramic vistas. In general in County Wexford and environs, we like to avail of the services of Cathy Keane, owner-operator of Heritage Tours Wexford. Cathy does a superior job, irrespective of venue; however, she particularly shines in Enniscorthy, where she lives and where her company is based.

The Society Of The United Irishmen

¶ The United Irishmen formed in Belfast in 1791, guided principally by Presbyterian merchants who were conscious of the American and French revolutions. After the 1798 Rebellion, some of them emigrated to Savannah, where they worshipped at Independent Presbyterian Church and contributed to the establishment, in 1812, of the Hibernian Society of Savannah, which remains active.
¶ Several members of the Church of Ireland (the Episcopal church in Ireland) became leading United Irish figures, with one, Theobald Wolfe Tone, emerging as the movement’s chief ideologue.
¶ In his pamphlet Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791), Tone advocated “a complete and radical emancipation of our country” by a movement dedicated to “comprehensively embrac[ing] Irishmen of all denominations” in the cause of “a nation governed by herself.”
¶ The United Irish symbol incorporated the Irish harp, the cap of liberty, and two ribbons. One ribbon carried the single word “Equality”; and the other, referring to the harp, stated, “It Is New Strung and Shall Be Heard.”
¶ While the British quashed the rebellion, its extensive scale demonstrated Ireland’s ability to mount significant armed resistance.
¶ Shocked by the uprising — including United Irish success at soliciting French military aid — the British determined to abolish the Dublin-based Irish Parliament, a body characterized by limited powers and a very restricted franchise. In a radical move, the authorities created a new national entity: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (the UK), governed from London.
¶ In other words, the United Irish Rebellion precipitated the UK, which came into existence on January 1, 1801, via the Act of Union .
¶ County Wexford was central to the rebellion. There, the insurgents saw their greatest successes and disasters. For around three weeks, from late May 1798, they gained control of most of the county, including three of its four principal towns: Wexford Town (south); Enniscorthy (center); Gorey (north). Some historians label this period the “Wexford republic.”
¶ Important rebel victories in County Wexford include the Battle of Oulart Hill (May 27, 1798). By contrast, the entire rebellion produced no bloodier incident than the rebel defeat at the Battle of New Ross (June 5, 1798), Wexford’s fourth major town, where Irish deaths approached 3,000.
¶ While multiple sites in County Wexford provide resources for studying the United Irish Rebellion of 1798, none surpasses Enniscorthy. The rebellion’s turning point, in favor of the British colonial authorities, was the Battle of Vinegar Hill. The engagement occurred not just on Vinegar Hill, next to Enniscorthy, but also in the town itself on June 21, 1798.

Vinegar Hill

¶ The Battle of Vinegar Hill centered on an attack by a British force of around 13,000 on a rebel camp of between 16,000 and 20,000 men, women, and children. Covering Vinegar Hill (“hill of the berry wood”), the camp had become the Wexford rebels’ de facto military headquarters.
¶ Providing excellent views across much of County Wexford, Vinegar Hill made strategic sense for the rebels’ goal: a large, decisive battle.
¶ In the event, the rebels were disadvantaged by a lack of guns; they relied primarily on pikes, forged by blacksmiths. The “pikeman” remains the human icon of the rebellion — a figure also known as the “croppy” due to the rebels’ preference for a cropped haircut, intended to signal their repudiation of wig-wearing aristocrats.

¶ Some historians of the Battle of Vinegar Hill place the rebel death toll at 1,200, although follow-up killings of escaping insurgents were significant. The battlefield losses would have been higher but for the late arrival of one of the British columns, under General Francis Needham, a British Army veteran of the American Revolutionary War. The British had charged thee columns with encircling the hill.
¶ Known as “Needham’s Gap,” the incomplete portion of the encirclement permitted the escape of large numbers from the rebel camp. After Vinegar Hill, unable to regroup as a coordinated force, the rebels were obliged to resort to dispersed guerrilla warfare.
¶ In a sonnet titled “Requiem for the Croppies” (first published in 1966), Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney imagined the Battle of Vinegar Hill from an insurgent’s perspective: “on Vinegar Hill, the final conclave. \ Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon. \ The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.” The piece ends with a reference to the barley grains that the rebels carried in their pockets for sustenance: “They buried us [on Vinegar Hill] without shroud or coffin \ And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.”

Remembering ’98

¶ In Ireland’s most popular novel of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Charles J. Kickham’s Knocknagow (1873), one female character, “old Mrs. Donovan,” remembers 1798, which she experienced as a girl, as “the year uv [of] the hill, an’ the hangin’ an’ the floggin’ an’ all.” Addressing a veteran of the conflict, another character (a male, likely in his middle to late twenties), declares, “I’d like to see that old pike of yours taken from the thatch [the roofing of a house] for a manly fight like that you fought in ’98.”
¶ Fifty years after the Great Hunger (the potato famine of the 1840s), a recovering Ireland became energized to mark the centenary of the 1798 Rebellion. Key organizers included the poet William Butler Yeats and the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the country’s largest political party, John Redmond, a native of Wexford Town.
¶ In the April 1898 issue of the periodical Nineteenth Century, Redmond asserted that a fully realized program of commemoration would demonstrate that “if only the means were at hand, Irishmen would not be loathe again to take up the weapons of revolution to forward their ends.”
¶ After the centenary, the Irish continued to acknowledge ’98. One legacy of the bicentenary is Éamonn O'Doherty’s roadside sculpture, Fuascailt ( the Irish-language term for “Liberation”), at Holmestown, County Wexford (five miles west of GS’s Wexford Campus), which depicts five pikemen in a circle.
¶ Monuments commemorating the rebellion exist throughout Ireland, especially County Wexford. Enniscorthy’s Market Square, scene of intense fighting in 1798, contains a bronze memorial statue, unveiled on May 31, 1908. Created by an Irish Protestant sculptor, Oliver Sheppard, it depicts the rebel Roman Catholic priest, Father John Murphy of Boolavogue, pointing out Vinegar Hill to a young insurgent, who carries a banner and a homemade sword.

Emmet Park, Savannah

¶ One of Theobald Wolfe Tone’s closest United Irish friends was his fellow Episcopalian Thomas Addis Emmet, who went into exile after serving time in British jails for revolutionary activity during ’98. (He became New York State’s Attorney General.)
¶ After the rebellion, his younger brother, Robert Emmet, attempted to reorganize the Society of the United Irishmen, and on July 23, 1803, he led a small-scale, unsuccessful uprising in Dublin, which resulted in his trial for treason. The penultimate line of his speech from the dock persists as a touchstone of Irish nationalism: “When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written.”
¶ Robert Emmet’s execution ensured his status as a United Irish martyr, particularly among Irish communities abroad. In 1902, the Savannah Irish persuaded the city to convert a recreational space near the river, informally known as Irish Green, into a designated municipal park called Emmet Park. It functions as a center for Irish gatherings, most notably the annual Celtic Cross Ceremony on the Sunday before St. Patrick’s Day.

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Pugin Cathedral

Background: Catholic Relief

¶ Courses in history, religious studies, architecture, interior design, sociology, and more derive educational value from engagement with the Roman Catholic cathedral in central Enniscorthy. Constructed, fitted out, and decorated primarily between 1843 and 1860, it serves as the seat (cathedra) of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Ferns, a religious jurisdiction essentially coterminous with County Wexford.
¶ The cathedral is dedicated to St. Aiden, also known as St. Maedoc, who, late in the sixth century, established a monastery at Ferns in north County Wexford.
¶ It is productive to approach the nineteenth-century cathedral in Enniscorthy in terms of the social and political strengthening of Ireland’s Roman Catholic population — then almost 90% of the total population — after a long period of repression.
¶ From the decade of the 1790s, the British colonial authorities began to ease legal restrictions, known as penal laws, that, for around a century, had restricted the rights of Roman Catholics in multiple areas, not least: worship; education; employment; voting; serving in elected office; and owning and inheriting property.
¶ One major element of so-called Catholic relief was the British government’s financial support for the establishment, in 1795, of a Roman Catholic seminary, Maynooth College, near Dublin, for “the better education of persons [priests] professing the Popish or Roman Catholic religion.”
¶ By the mid-nineteenth century, Maynooth had become earth’s largest seminary, generating priests for both domestic and foreign (missionary) service. Subsequently, additional Irish seminaries emerged, generally on a diocesan basis. In 1895, St. Peter’s College in Wexford Town — the seminary of the Diocese of Ferns — welcomed its first class of seminarians. Several priests who rose to prominence in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah trained at St. Peter’s.
¶ Prior to Maynooth’s existence, Irishmen received priestly instruction at Irish Colleges and other seminaries in continental Europe. The British authorities grew fearful that French-trained Irish priests would indoctrinate their flocks with revolutionary precepts.
¶ The right of Roman Catholics to sit in the United Kingdom parliament in London was central to one great phase of the campaign for Catholic relief. During the 1820s, the Irish Roman Catholic lawyer Daniel O’Connell orchestrated a mass popular movement, predicated on non-violent protest, to achieve that goal, labelled Catholic Emancipation.
¶ In 1829, with great reluctance, the British Prime Minister, the Dublin-born Duke of Wellington, and his deputy, Robert Peel, ensured the passage of legislation that enshrined O’Connell’s demands in United Kingdom law. O’Connell gained such monikers and the Emancipist and the Liberator; and he became one of the ablest members of the House of Commons, the UK Parliament’s lower chamber.
¶ Having achieved Catholic Emancipation, O’Connell spearheaded another large-scale, non-violent movement. Its ambition was to force repeal of the Act of Union, which had abolished the Dublin-based Irish parliament and established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Repeal Campaign was not successful, but it perfected the Monster Meeting as a means to signal popular support (or people power).
¶ A contemporary observer estimated that 500,000 individuals congregated for the Monster Meeting that O’Connell held at the Repeal Field, Enniscorthy, on Thursday, July 20, 1843. In his speech on that occasion, O’Connell declared that the crowd “exceed[ed] in magnitude any assembly that I have ever witnessed before.”
¶ Elsewhere in his Enniscorthy address, O’Connell said, “[T]here must be something in the wind; and so there is, and I'll tell you what it is. It is Repeal [great cheering]. That is on the wild winds of heaven, and the breeze fresh from [County] Wexford blows over it. … [T]he seeds of liberty are upon the pinions of that wind, and they shall cover the entire land with the angel wing of protection and freedom [cheers].”
¶ O’Connell drew to a conclusion by stating, “Let there then be but one cry through the county of Wexford: Old Ireland and Liberty; Liberty and Old Ireland [cheers]. … We will soon —Protestant and Catholic, Presbyterian and Dissenter — all, all be combined. We are working for all, not for a few. The morning of liberty is dawning upon us, and Old Ireland shall be a nation.”

A.W.N. Pugin

¶ As Ireland’s Catholics responded to Catholic relief, they built hundreds of new churches. Some commissions went to Englishman (and convert to Catholicism) Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the architect most responsible for the widespread adoption of the Gothic Revival style in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Here, “Gothic” is essentially a synonym for “medieval.”
¶ Pugin designed the clock tower, often called Big Ben, for the Palace of Westminster, London (home to the UK’s Parliament), as well as most of the palace’s interiors. He also designed major additions to the seminary at Maynooth.
¶ Pugin’s connection to Wexford was through John Hyacinth Talbot, a Roman Catholic landowner in the county. Talbot’s niece had married Pugin’s principal English patron, the Earl of Shrewsbury.
¶ In addition to St. Aiden’s Cathedral, Enniscorthy, other Roman Catholic places of worship in County Wexford attributed to Pugin include: the parish churches at Barntown, Bree, Gorey, Ramsgrange, and Tagoat; private chapels for the Cliffe and Power families; and a chapel for St. Peter’s College, Wexford Town (a school that later expanded to include a seminary).
¶ Visit Wexford has produced a PDF guide, The Pugin Trail, which details the architect’s accomplishments in County Wexford.
¶ In an essay in A.W.N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival (Yale University Press and Bard Graduate Center, 1995), the architectural historian Roderick O’Donnell observes that Pugin exhibited “a missionary zeal to re-educate the Catholic clergy” and to “rechurch” the Catholic laity.
¶ For St. Aiden’s (restored to most of its original specifications in 1994), Pugin employed a County Wexford native, Richard Pierce, as his clerk-of-works. Independently, Pierce would design the so-called twin churches in Wexford Town. (Pierce’s brother, James, developed an ironworks with the family name into a major business in Wexford Town.)
¶ Constructed from local field stone, much of it from a ruined Franicsian friary, St. Aiden’s is distinguished by external buttresses. Notable interior features include: exposed scissors-truss roof beams; a Caen-stone reredos; colorful stencil-work; and encaustic tiles (produced by the Minton company, also responsible for tiles in the US Capitol).
¶ According to Roderick O’Donnell, two major phases of building occurred: “the east parts from July 1843 to June 1846, and the nave and aisles from 1846 to 1848.” Notable about this timeline is that much of it overlaps with the Great Hunger or potato famine (1845-1849).
¶ The cathedral’s high altar was carved (and is signed) by James Pearse, who moved to Dublin from his native England to forge a career as a monumental sculptor. Both of his sons, Patrick and Willie, would be executed for their participation in Ireland’s Easter 1916 Rising, of which Patrick was a principal organizer.

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Nearly Zero Energy Building

¶ Currently under construction just outside Enniscorthy is a European Center of Excellence in High-Performance Buildings. Fundamentally, the initiative is a joint venture whose partners include (but are not limited to) the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and Wexford County Council.
¶ In association with similar United Nations-affiliated entities in New York and Vancouver, the facility will conduct research into and develop standards for energy-efficient, low-emissions buildings, both residential and commercial. It will also provide education and training in the design, construction, and maintenance of such structures. Buildings account for around a quarter of earth’s greenhouse-gas emissions.
¶ In pursuit of favorable BERs (building energy ratings), passive technologies minimize energy use, especially as regards the winter heating and summer cooling of rooms and the year-round heating of water. Low emissions and low running costs result.
¶ Key to the above outcomes is the basic structure, but also such additional efficiency features as: insulation; solar panels; air-recirculation systems; compressed-wood-based heating systems; and triple-glazed doors and windows.
¶ Associated with the formative stage of the Center of Excellence project was Ireland’s inaugural nZEB — nearly zero energy building — conference, held in Wexford Town in 2017. The event attracted around 200 domestic and international delegates.
¶ Enniscorthy was the site of Ireland’s first nZEB public-housing scheme, developed by Wexford County Council in conjunction with the private-sector construction firm, Michael Bennett Group, headquartered in Enniscorthy.
¶ The debut residents took possession of their homes in 2017, although the Bennett Group had already built a private scheme, Grange Lough, in Rosslare Strand (south of Wexford Town), as the country’s first fully certified cluster of passive homes.
¶ Grange Lough was a winner at the 2011 Isover Energy Efficiency Awards. It manifests the Bennett Group’s commitment to using components manufactured by local companies.
¶ We enjoy a relationship with the company’s founder and principal, Michael Bennett, who points out that the thick mud walls and thick thatched roofs of traditional Irish homes constituted an early form of passive construction. He also underscores such challenges in Ireland as dampness during low-temperature periods of the year.
¶ Another consequential figure in the Center of Excellence initiative — also a friend of GS’s Wexford Campus — is Tomás O’Leary, cofounder of an architectural and landscape design company dedicated to nZEB principles. One of the company’s subsidiaries, the Passive House Academy, offers accredited training, as well as informational and consultancy services.
¶ Strong potential exists for GS faculty and students to interface with the emerging Center of Excellence and its network. Already, Penn State University has engaged in some collaborative efforts. Civil engineering, construction management, and sustainability are but three viable academic fields.

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