The Radisson – SAS Hotel, Farnham, Co. Cavan
Readers of the above restaurant review will see the high esteem in which I hold the restaurant and staff of the Radison – SAS hotel
A place where the ordinary people of Ireland are still unwelcome
at Farnham – but that’s as far as my admiration goes.
It seems to me absurd that motorists cannot drive their vehicles to within a comfortable distance of the hotel. Instead they must hand over the keys of their vehicle to valets who will park them out of sight and at some considerable distance away. When they wish to leave the hotel, their keys must then be handed to another valet who will fetch their car. The employment of a small army of valets must add considerably to the running costs of the hotel – costs which are then passed on to guests. But then I suppose such a luxury hotel caters for people who aren’t worried about such trivia as exorbitant prices.
The main foyer is huge; dominated by classical columns, a polished floor and a rather incongruous table that could do duty for a Séance or some attempt to get in touch with “the other side”. It is ringed by a number of seats and smaller tables, set back in little alcoves. Indeed were they concealed by curtains they would make excellent confessionals. But it does nothing to take away from the brooding and chilly atmosphere of this foyer. This is fine when filled with milling crowds, but when filled even with a few people the general atmosphere is of the ticket hall of a large continental railway station after the last train has left. The only people you expect to see are badly dressed, cigarette-touting scavengers and sweepers, yet even they are absent from the SAS Radisson hotel.
The hotel contains a number of truly ridiculous trinkets, one being a Steinway Grand Piano. As someone who loves Chopin I would never call a piano useless, except when it carries a sign forbidding anyone to play it or touch its keys. In Florencecourt House they have a beautiful original fortepiano, dating from the look of it to c. 1800. It would be outrageous for anyone to attempt to play such an instrument, but a Steinway Grand Piano, which looks quite modern and in generally good shape, to be thus left outside of the possibility of use, is bizarre. What would our Minister for Health, Mary Hernia, who is known for her gargantuan appetites for food, five-star hotels and piano players make of this?
I an assured by guests that they find the hotel comfortable, and I have no reason to doubt this. On my admittedly few visits there I have found the hotel to have a very cold and somewhat austere atmosphere. In the fine Botanical Restaurant one’s attention is grabbed by the excellence of the food, which is just as well as there is little to look at. In the evenings one sees through the windows a line of bright, regularly spaced bright lights which, for some reason, put me in mind of the illuminations around a high security prison.
As most people know I am confined to a wheelchair. In order to gain access to the second floor of the hotel I must use a lift – nothing strange about that. In the Radisson Hotel the lift is concealed by a length of full-length curtain down a rather dimly-lit, and dare I say creepy corridor. It’s a bit like one of those self-service ‘photo boots. The lift is quite small and you don’t operate it by merely pressing the number of your desired floor but by continuously holding some button or dead-man’s-handle device. Not surprisingly I have re-christened the lift as The TARDIS. And then when you eventually arrive at your floor there is no smooth egress from the lift, as you have to pass over a rather annoying lip. It seems obvious to me that the provision of access for the disabled in the hotel was an embarrassing after-thought, a strange situation considering that one of its operators is the Scandinavian Airline System, but then they’re operating in Ireland where is has long been accepted by the Powers-That-Be that the disabled could never afford to go near a five-star hotel.
My most recent visit there was as a guest of my dear and most generous friend, Joseph Donohoe of California. Joe is a really gifted man and an engaging conversationalist. He said, on one occasion, “I’m sure you could do something for the hotel”, knowing of course that my gifts extend far beyond that of the mere historian. I thus told him how, it must be ten years’ ago, I had received a telephone call from the then owner, Mr Roy McCabe, whom I found to be a most accessible individual. He invited me to go out to Farnham to see what they were doing there, and he undertook to be my guide. We finished are most amiable conversation with the undertaking that he would contact me shortly to firm up a date and a time for my visit… I have never heard from him since, and knowing him to be a busy man of business I did not contact him. I found the manner in which I was apparently dropped, and deemed unworthy of any further communication puzzling, though sadly far from unprecedented. Had someone, somewhere poured poison into Mr McCabe’s ears about me? I do hope not, but I would not be surprised if this had happened, though people should be given an opportunity to defend themselves against calumny and calumniators. You know, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get you.
Like most people in Co. Cavan I have nothing but hatred and contempt for the Maxwells, the previous owners of Farnham House, who were a group of grasping hypocritical tyrants. They were descendants of mongrel foxes from south of Glasgow who unceremoniously grabbed land from not only the native Irish but from their fellow settlers.
The Maxwells, upon their elevation to the Irish peerage inn 1756, adopted the title “Barons Farnham” supposedly after their place of residence in Co. Cavan. Farnham sounded ever so genteel – far better than the place-name Fernan or Farnan, shown on the original early Seventeenth century Plantation maps, signifying a pave where alders grew. (This was first pointed out by the late Oliver Davies in the 1940s, and he may not have been the first to know it.)
Their involvement with the Anglican Church certainly did the latter institution no favours. They took a leading role in the so-called Second Reformation of the 1820s, when many gullible people in England were fleeced into providing large sums of money to promote evangelical movements in Ireland to win the Irish peasantry from the “darkness of Popish obscurantism”. Apart from a few converts, this campaign was a fiasco. One of the means used to win converts was the provision of food to the starving and malnourished, most of whom gladly took the offered provisions in return for a very brief conversion to Protestantism, but once they had consumed enough food they returned to the religious practices of their birth. Their preference for Protestants, to fill jobs in the house and on their estate, attained almost farcical proportions. I have noted before how the Lord Farnham of the late nineteenth century was urged to fill posts on his estate with “English Protestants”. A policy of employing only Protestants might have been defensible to a certain extent; so too might have been the opinion that the best people to employ for certain tasks were Englishmen, as they had greater knowledge and experience in the performance of some tasks; but to seek only “English Protestants” was absurd. Not only would it have excluded the composer of “Land of Hope and Glory” – sir Edward Elgar, a close friend of King Edward VII, and an English Catholic – but it showed that the Farnhams’ anti-Catholic bigotry would have left them with no qualms whatsoever about employing the greatest English jailbirds, many of whom had been baptised and brought up in the Church of England.
But their religiosity did not extend to all areas of human activity. Folklore still current, though not recorded by the Irish Folklore Commission, tells the tale of the “Human Hunts” enacted at Farnham. Local girls were stripped and hounds set upon them. They were pursued through the Farnham House demesne grounds and some managed to gain sanctuary in the grounds’ many trees. They were only liberated from their sylvan refuges by some of the young “gentlemen” staying at the house who would carry them away from the fangs of the baying hounds on horseback – though in return for unspecified favours. Perhaps the management of the hotel might seek to stage a re-enactment of the Human Hunt one of these days, while the management of Cavan County Museum might care to dwell that the perpetrators and participants in such activities are probably among the portraits of the Farnhams they hold, so gladly donated to them by a former Lady Farnham. (It might be interesting for some of the ordinary inhabitants of the Farnham area to look at these portraits, and see how frequently the features reproduced could be discerned amongst their ordinary neighbours.)
