Mark Zuckerberg’s Irish castle is a nineteenth-century Gothic-revival house on the Blackwater, bought from a Forte daughter by a couple already funding three local GAA clubs, which makes it younger and far more local than its headlines.
Every headline calls it a castle, and every headline is right in the way an estate agent is right. The Strancally that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan bought this summer is a three-storey house of cut stone in the Gothic-revival manner, built for a Tory MP around 1830. The Strancally of the history books, the old fortress with the legends attached, is a ruin about 4.5km upriver.
The price has been travelling just as freely. Gulf News and Worldwide News ran “$57 million” castle stories in mid-November as though the deal were fresh. That figure is the October register price turned into dollars, and the sale itself completed in August.
James and George Richard Pain designed the house
The architects were the Pain brothers. Their client was John Keily, a former Conservative MP, though RTÉ spells him Kiely, and the outlets cannot agree on the year either: TheJournal.ie gives 1830, while RTÉ said 1827 when the sale broke in August. Houses tend to outlast the spelling of the men who built them.
Gothic revival was the fashion for making a new country house look as if it had always been there, and Strancally does the job well enough that the word “castle” has stuck for two centuries. What the Pains produced was a gentleman’s residence with the silhouette of a stronghold. It stands on the Blackwater in west Waterford, in the townland of Knockanore.
The grim stories people like to tell about Strancally belong to the ruin upriver. That building dates from the Desmond era, when a castle on the Blackwater was expected to hold off neighbours rather than impress them. The house Zuckerberg and Chan now own was built for entertaining them.
A Forte daughter and her husband sold it
The sellers were Michael and Giancarla Alen-Buckley. She is a daughter of the late Charles Forte and a sister of Rocco Forte, whose name is over the door at Rocco Forte Hotels. He co-founded RAB Capital, a private investment firm in London. The Irish Times reported that they had owned Strancally since around the turn of the century and spent about two decades restoring it.
So the house passes from a hotel dynasty to the founder of Facebook, and neither party has given the press much to go on. The sale was off-market. When The Irish Times broke the story on 20 August, saying the deal had been done several weeks earlier, it had not yet reached the Property Price Register.
The Alen-Buckleys did give one line. In a statement to The Irish Times, they said “We leave our home of 25 years fondly”, which is about as warm as a vendor’s statement ever gets.
The register price outran every early guess
In August, The Irish Times relayed property-market sources who put the deal at €20m to €30m. That was a reasonable guess for a big house in rural Waterford, and it turned out to be well short.
On 7 October the register entry appeared, reported that day by RTÉ, The Irish Times, TheJournal.ie and the Irish Examiner. It records €51,171,155 for Strancally Castle at Knockanore, with the sale completed on 17 August.
The outlets part company over what that number buys. RTÉ and TheJournal.ie read it as the house together with its estate. The Irish Times says the total spend would greatly exceed the register figure once the whole 440 acres is taken into account. No outlet has published a total for the land, so the honest description is the register’s own: a price recorded for the property, with the rest of the bill unknown.
A price register records what was paid, and nothing else. It does not say what else changed hands, or when.
Zuckerberg and Chan will keep their American address
The Irish Times reported in August that the couple will go on living in the United States and use Strancally when they are in Ireland. There is a reason to come. Meta has had its European headquarters in Ireland since 2009, and The Irish Times puts its Irish workforce at about 1,500 people.
The only words on the house so far have come through a spokesperson, who told The Irish Times and RTÉ’s News at One that the family is “excited to continue caring for this historic home“. The statement also mentions spending time in Ireland, where Meta keeps its international headquarters. “Continue” is a custodian’s verb, and the right one for a new owner of an old Irish house to choose.
Waterford joins a property list that is already long. By recent reports it includes a deal on an unfinished mansion on Indian Creek island in Miami and large landholdings in Hawaii. Against a fortune Bloomberg puts at $229bn, most of it a stake of about 13 per cent in Meta, a country house on the Blackwater is a small line in the accounts. It is a much larger line in Knockanore.
Waterford’s GAA clubs got the first gift
The new neighbours come in two kinds. The Irish Examiner places Strancally about 30 minutes by car from Youghal in East Cork and a short distance from Ballynatray House, the estate of James Dyson. Two billionaires can now visit each other without using a helicopter.
The other neighbours are the parish clubs. On 29 September the couple announced €150,000 for the three GAA clubs nearest the castle: Shamrocks, which is the Knockanore club, Tallow and Lismore. Each will receive €50,000, paid over two years. The Irish Examiner called it the couple’s first Irish philanthropic gift since the purchase. In their joint statement they described themselves as new members of the Waterford community, which, for people who will keep their address in the United States, was gracefully put.
The sums mean different things at each end. Shamrocks has 200 members, according to the Irish Examiner, and officials at Tallow described the gift as the largest single donation in the club’s 139-year history. Bloomberg notes that Zuckerberg announced in December 2015 that he would give away 99 per cent of his Meta stock during his lifetime. A hurling club in west Waterford is one of the smaller destinations that pledge has reached, and one of the few where the whole parish will know exactly what the money paid for.
The detail people will repeat is how the money arrived. Tómas Roche, the Shamrocks chairman, told The Irish Times that the club secretary, Tim Lenehan, took a call from a Dublin solicitor. That led to a call with a Zuckerberg representative in Los Angeles.
DDW’s reading is that this chain of calls is the most Irish thing about the whole affair, more Irish than any battlement. A fortune made in California reached a parish on the Blackwater the way news has always reached Irish parishes, through a solicitor and a secretary’s telephone. Strancally changed hands on a register in Dublin. In Knockanore, the club secretary’s phone rang.
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