house

Terraced two-bay four-storey house, built c.1815. Now also in use as shop and having timber shopfront to ground floor. Pitched slate roof with eaves course and cast-iron rainwater goods. Ruled-and-lined rendered walls. Square-headed window openings having limestone sills and bipartite one-over-one pane timber sliding sash windows. Shopfront comprising timber pilasters flanking openings with timber fascia with painted lettering and cornice. Square-headed plate glass windows with timber sills and rendered stall risers. Square-headed door opening with timber panelled double-leaf doors and painted over-light.

This building occupies a prominent site immediately next to the West Gate and is of similar substantial size and form to the surrounding buildings. The rear wall may well incorporate the town wall of Clonmel. It retains interesting features including a timber shopfront and bipartite sash windows. A plaque records that the house was the birthplace of Sr. Alice O’Sullivan (1836-70) of the Daughters of Charity. Sr. O’Sullivan travelled to China in 1863 and eventually settled in Tianjin where she served in an infirmary and orphanage dedicated to the care of abandoned children, mostly girls, impacted by an outbreak of cholera. Many of the children died in their care and, fuelled by anti-Western sentiment, rumours spread that the sisters were harvesting their organs for medicinal purposes. Sr. O’Sullivan was one of ten members of her community martyred when a mob attacked the orphanage on the 21st June 1870.