Adam Cusack

Adam Cusack (c.1630–1681) was an Irish landowner, barrister and judge of the seventeenth century.

He was born at Rathgar (then deep in the countryside, now a suburb of Dublin), the second son of Robert Cusack of Rathgar Castle (which Adam inherited on the death of his elder brother) and his wife Alice, daughter of Sir George Sexton of Limerick.[1] His father sat in the Irish House of Commons as MP for Kells in the Parliament of 1639, but was expelled frm the House in 1642. Adam was the grandson of John Cusacke (died 1626), a wealthy Dublin merchant who was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1608-9, and his wife Margaret Gough (née Allen). The Cusacks originally came from Ballymolghan, County Meath.[2] Richard Cusack is mentioned as being "of Ballymolghan" in official records in 1508.[3]

During the Battle of Rathmines in August 1649 Rathgar Castle was surrounded by troops, but was not attacked: Adam and his father were both in the Castle at the time.[4] He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and became a fellow of the college in 1654. He entered Lincoln's Inn in 1655, was called to the Bar in 1660, and entered the King's Inn in 1661. His choice of the law as a profession may have been influenced by the fact that James Barry, 1st Baron Barry of Santry, a leading barrister who became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland in 1660, was his cousin, his mother being Adam's paternal aunt Anne Cusacke. [5]

Adam was appointed second justice of the provincial court of Connacht in 1661 and became the last Chief Justice of Connacht in 1670.[6] On the abolition of that office in 1672 he was appointed a justice of the Court of Common Pleas (Ireland). In the relaxed political atmosphere of the early 1670s his Anglo-Irish background and his notably tolerant attitude to Roman Catholics[7] were not professional disadvantages. He had also the advantage of having married Catherine Keating, sister of John Keating, later to be Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas, and niece of Maurice Eustace, Lord Chancellor of Ireland 1660-1665.[8]

The only serious objection to his appointment to the High Court Bench was his health: from early middle age onwards he suffered badly from gout, which became so severe that he was unable to perform his judicial duties for at least two years.[9] He died, aged only about 50, in 1681, and was buried in St. Audoen's Church, Dublin. In his will, which, according to Elrington Ball, shows his kindly and charitable nature, he left money to the poor of St. Audoen's parish and of Rathfarnham, for the relief of poor prisoners, and bequests to the Bluecoat School at Oxmantown and to the army hospital at Back Lane, Dublin.[10] The bulk of his estate was left to his widow Catherine, who remarried his cousin Nicholas Cusack; she and Adam had no children.

Rathgar Castle fell into decay in the eighteenth century, and was a ruin by 1769, when the Dutch-born artist Gabriel Beranger did a watercolour which shows two men surveying the remains. The Castle's precise location is something of a mystery, but it probably stood on what is now Highfield Road, at the present site of St. Luke's Hospital, Rathgar. It was built by the Segrave family in the sixteenth century, on what had previously been monastic land,[11] and was bought by Adam's grandfather John in 1609.[12]