Private tragedy for a titled family has just nudged it into the Northern eyeline, a rare event. This is not a place with a social scene for the grand that is visible to most citizens, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
Shiny magazines that might dote on toffs and their doings have to settle much of the time for the affluent youthful and photogenic media folk. The Shaftesbury Estate may soon face scrutiny because it holds the deeds to the centre of Northern Ireland, but the record suggests public fuss won't last.
A sizeable section of the upper-upper class probably decided half a century back that however the rest of Ireland evolved, the north-eastern counties would never feel mass nostalgia for big houses and those who lived in them.
Best live quietly and/or elsewhere. A scattering with titles dating from 17th-century settlement or earlier remain in Northern fastnesses, titles wrapping history and politics to usually obscure effect around present-day wealth.
The largest landowner in Fermanagh is the little-known Earl of Erne, John Crichton, who farms at Crom Castle; as Queen Elizabeth's representative in the county he welcomed Prince Charles to his place in 1996. Then there's the Duke of Abercorn, who farms at Baron's Court near Omagh. Largest landowner in Tyrone with 15,000 acres and, yes, the queen's representative in the county.
When the Duchess of Abercorn arrived to give out prizes for a writing competition in a school near mountainy Carrickmore a few years back, in the name of her personal project the Pushkin Trust, a local Sinn féin councillor protested. The grievance was hard to articulate. What, he wondered, was Pushkin to Carrickmore? This embarrassed the education minister of the day, one Martin McGuinness, who swiftly praised the prize-giving having been reminded that the duchess was a descendant of the great Russian.
When Lady Mary Bury of Mountstewart was photographed signing nomination papers last month for Iris Robinson, DUP MP for Strangford, it was an unusual sighting - and a twist of the knife for declining Ulster Unionism, once the natural party for aristos in local politics.
In the early 1900s, Belfast had a Lord Shaftesbury as lord mayor. More recent holders of the title only contacted Northern Ireland through an office in Bangor, Co Down. When Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, was found murdered in the French Alps last month, and when his eldest son, a London banker also called Anthony, then died of a heart attack, the implications for a far-off inheritance only emerged slowly. What seized attention were the details of the 10th earl's life: estranged wife and her brother under investigation by French police for his murder, bar hostess girlfriends. A philanthropist, said "friends", whose special interest was lap-dancers.
It turns out that the Shaftesbury Estate holds the deeds to Lough Neagh.
Yes, the wobbly oblong on the map that touches five counties. The place Seamus Heaney calls home, source of much folklore, a sheet of blue hiding those strange creatures, eels, which the Dutch (though not the Irish) love to eat; and considerable, increasing pollution. It is a stretch of water so vast and in many eyes so pointless, that in the mid-1960s Stormont prime minister Captain Terence O'Neill, last of the aristocrat front-line unionists, proposed to drain it, fill it in and make a county Neagh. (He thought about draining Strangford too, though he realised the inrush from the sea might be a problem.)
More than 300 years ago Charles I granted the bed of the lough, fishing and hunting rights on and around it to Arthur Chichester, Lord Donegall: the title passed, in the complicated way these things do, to the Shaftesburys. The biggest income is in payments for sand dredged from the lough's bed.
After generations of resentment the estate no longer takes rent from the eel-fishers, now a group torn between a co-operative that bought the rights and a fishermen's association that criticises the co-op as old-fashioned. Nor have the Shaftesburys wanted money in return for the 40 per cent of the North's drinking water that apparently comes from Lough Neagh - a statistic best not contemplated.
But the deceased 10th earl, a man whose lifestyle gobbled cash, tried in vain to sell his rights to the government some time ago. Now a water-tax is on the horizon, the issue tossed around tetchily in the short-lived power-sharing Stormont to land on the desks of direct rule ministers.
When times at last return to normal for the bereaved Ashley-Coopers, the worry is that the estate will try to maximise income from their watery acres, at a cost to government that will in turn be passed to the taxpayers.
Desire for a quiet life may bring swift settlement. Ogden Nash liked eels "except in meals and the way they feels". In history-ridden Northern Ireland, earls know many are no keener on them as a species: best to imitate the eel and stay out of the light.