For
some unfathomable reason our City Fathers – and their chosen ‘local historians’
– wish to reiterate endlessly the conjecture that Derramore House - the ‘yella house’ locally – the then home
of Isaac Corry, who served English interests for a few short years as
Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, and who had constructed the road that still
bears the name of his Office – in order to avoid, it is said, any chance
meeting with his Newry constituents! - was the location where ‘The Act of Union was signed’ – or ‘the deeds
thereof’, or whatever. Most recently
this cant was delivered through the mouth of John Daly in the TV brief, ‘A
Short History of Newry’, advised by Anne Smith and Anthony Russell of the Old
Newry Society. John also went on at
length about the Newry Highwayman – whoever that fictional character might have been!
Doubtless
there were occasions when the two Northerners on their way to the Parliament in
Dublin rested
here awhile to hatch and discuss some of their devious and corrupt plans to
bribe and cajole their former parliamentary colleagues into espousing their treachery!
But
the very suggestion that such a momentous document was signed, sealed and
delivered in Bessbrook is simply beyond belief.
As a tourist 'catch', it is laughable.
More
realistically, the following is recorded by Viscount Cloncurry in his ‘Personal
Recollections’ of that time:
‘I
graduated in Arts in the year 1795. As
it happened, it was on the day on which my father entertained the Lord
Lieutenant, the Earl of Westmorland, for the first time at Mornington House, a
residence in Merrion Street
which he had just purchased at a cost of £8000 from the late Marquis
Wellesley.
Among
the notables at this entertainment I may mention the presence of the Duke of
Wellington who attended as an aide-de-camp of the Lord Lieutenant.
The
‘locale’ was subsequently rendered infamous as the ‘nidus’ of that miserable
hatching of corruption from which the Union
between the two kingdoms was evolved. Mornington was rented from my father by Lord Castlereagh during the
course of the Union debates and in it were concocted those plots that ended in
overturning the liberties, and arresting the prosperity of Ireland.
There
also were celebrated with corrupt profusion, suited to the occasion, the
nightly orgies of the plotters ….
A
year after the Union, the House, as part of
his personal property, was sold for £2,500.’
There
is, to my mind, no evidence whatever for the former contention – while the
latter is a factual record and beyond contention.
But
will that be an end to it?
Don’t
bet on it!
History 
