The Hellfire Club

Askeaton Contemporary Arts commissioned a selection of prominent Irish artists to produce new artworks based around the town’s Hellfire Club legacy, artworks by Stephen Brandes, Louise Manifold, Sean Lynch, Diana Copperwhite and Tom Fitzgerald are all detailed in this accompanying publication. Additional research material is featured alongside critical texts by Michele Horrigan, Padraic E Moore and Brian O’Doherty.

Upon an island in the middle of Askeaton, the remains of a Hellfire Club from the 1700s can be seen. Known as a satirical gentleman’s club, those who met there considered it as a way of shocking the outside world. The supposed president was the Devil, although the members themselves did not apparently worship demons or the Devil, but called themselves devils. Ceremonial feasts took place, all washed down with alcoholic punch. While lurid tales are often recounted in local folklore of other outrageous rituals enacted, very little remaining information or evidence exists of the activities of the Askeaton Hellfire.

Today, the club building is inaccessible to the public, as heritage services currently try to stabilise the building from continued collapse since its abandonment in the 1800s. Around this site of physical decay, featured artists have considered the Hellfire history, its non-conformist allusions to the society of the 1700s, and its material presence as a crumbling ruin in the middle of a small Irish countryside town.