Ambassador’s wife traces her Kilrush roots

PATRICIA Dubois Zanini, the new Italian ambassador’s Belgian-born wife, her sister and the latter’s two children were in Kilrush on Wednesday morning to visit their ancestral Bulger and Scanlan family graves.
The visit coincided with work being carried out under the leadership of Paul O’Brien and Kay Clancy in cleaning up the Kilrush Church of Ireland Graveyard.
Patricia Zanini’s great-grandmother, Anne Bulger, was born in 1875 in Kilrush, where her father, Daniel Scanlan Bulger, ran a loan office and other businesses in Moore Street. The Bulger family moved from Moore Street to Dublin about a decade later. In 1896, in University Church in Dublin, Anne married Jules Tinchant, a Mexican whose family had a cigar business in Belgium, where they settled down.
When Daniel Scanlan Bulger fell ill and died in Dublin in 1904, his wife, also Anne (née Delany), applied to be admitted a member of the Dublin Stock Exchange in his place but her request was turned down, apparently on account of her gender. Instead, she moved to Lisdoonvarna and set up the Thomond House Hotel and golf links, now the Hydro.
The visitors to Kilrush paid their respects at the family plot where those buried include three children of Daniel Scanlan Bulger, who died in infancy in 1867, 1872 and 1874; John Bulger (d.1836) and Mary Bulger née Scanlan (d.1864), probably Daniel’s parents; and Daniel Scanlan and Ellen Scanlan née Kelly (both d.1830), probably Mary’s parents and thus the great-great-great-great-great-grandparents of the younger visitors.
Daniel Delany Bulger, Laurence Quinlivan Bulger and Michael Joseph Bulger, the three surviving sons of Daniel Scanlan Bulger and Anne Delany, were all noted sportsmen. In 1894, Daniel Bulger assisted Pierre de Coubertin of France in establishing an international sporting festival. Without Bulger, athletics historian Cyril White has suggested, the International Olympic Committee would not have formed when it did.
Daniel’s Kilrush-born brothers, Laurence and Michael, both played on the Irish rugby team, so it is fitting the visit of their sister’s great-granddaughter from Italy to Kilrush happened in the week in which Ireland beat Italy in their RBS Six Nations match.
The visitors were helped in their research by Paul O’Brien and Kay Clancy of the Kilrush Local History Group and Paddy Waldron of the Clare Roots Society.