Maurice FitzGerald, 18th Knight of Kerry

Sir Maurice inherited the Fitzgerald family estates in County Kerry, which included residences and lands at Ballinruddery near Listowel, and Glanleam House on Valentia Island.

[4] Sir Maurice was an enthusiastic botanist, recognised the unique potential of the island's microclimate for sub-tropical plants and laid out a fifty-acre garden, using species just introduced from South America.

His efforts won him great acclaim at the time and today his gardens have matured into dense woodlands.

He had found there the highest waves that Ireland knows, cliffs that at one spot rise to the height of 600 feet, tamarisks and fuchsias that no sea winds can intimidate, and the old 'Knight of Kerry,' who, at the age of nearly 80, preserved the spirits, the grace and the majestic beauty of days gone by -- as chivalrous a representative of Desmond's great Norman House as it had ever put forth in those times when it fought side by side with the greatest Gaelic Houses, for Ireland's ancient faith, and the immemorial rights of its Palatinate."

Blackburne writes of Sir Maurice at the time of Tennyson's visit that: "[No one] will hardly have forgotten the old Knight of Kerry, the owner of the Island, his dignified presence and his redolence of Grattan and John Philpot Curran and Castlereagh and the Irish Parliament in which he sat for many years" (Blackburne qtd.

Sir Maurice FitzGerald represented County Kerry in the Irish House of Commons from 1795 until the Act of Union in 1801.