Arthur Guinness, 1st Baron Ardilaun

He was educated at Eton and Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated BA in 1862, and in 1868 succeeded his father as the second Baronet Guinness of Ashford.

After withdrawing from the Guinness company in 1876, when he sold his half-share to his brother Edward for £600,000, he was in 1880 raised to the peerage as Baron Ardilaun, of Ashford in the County of Galway.

[7] When Arthur's acquisitions were combined with those of his father, total acreage for the Ashford estate was 33,298 with the result that Lord Ardilaun owned most of County Galway between Maam (Maum) Bridge and Lough Mask.

Owning 31,000 acres recently bought by his father or himself in Counties Galway and Mayo,[8] Ardilaun was placed in a difficult and unusual position during the Land War of the 1880s.

[11] Ardilaun was, like many in the Guinness family, a generous philanthropist, devoting himself to a number of public causes, including the restoration of Marsh's Library in Dublin and the extension of the city's Coombe Women's Hospital.

In buying and keeping intact the estate around Muckross House in 1899, he assisted the movement to preserve the lake and mountain landscape around Killarney, now a major tourist destination.

[12] In his best-known achievement, he also bought, landscaped, and gave to the capital, the central public park of St Stephen's Green, where his statue commissioned by the city can be seen opposite the Royal College of Surgeons.

[13] To do so he sponsored a Private bill that was passed as the Saint Stephen’s Green (Dublin) Act 1877, and after the landscaping it was formally opened to the public on 27 July 1880.

For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.