George Augustus Moore (1852-1933) inherited the estate in 1870 upon his father's death. He didn't have much interest in the estate (though the tenants were treated well) and he went to Paris to paint. He wasn't much good at that either so he turned to writing. His first novel, A Mummer's Wife was banned but subsequent novels were successful and he joined the Irish Literary Theatre, working with Yeats and Edward Martyn.
Moore was fiercely anti-Catholic and refused to pay for his nephew's education unless it was as a Protestant (an offer refused). In 1933, he stopped working on his latest novel, saying that "I have written enough" He died within the week. To quote Adrien Frazier's entry in the Encyclopaedia of Ireland
No turn-of-the-century literary figure of equivalent status has been so forgotten. For readers of another century, Moore is an artist of autobiography, an anti-nationalist champion of individual freedom, an experimentalist in narrative forms, and a Nietzschean who believed that only aesthetic terms is life justified.
His brother Maurice was a colonel in the Connacht Rangers and fought in the Boer War. When the first Dail was convened, he was nominated as envoy to the Republic of South Africa. This was more important than it might seem today. When the negotiations between the IRB leadership and the British government were underway, South Africa and other Dominions were co-opted as mediators, since the South African political system was seen as a good model for Ireland's nationalist aspirations (unless you were one of the ninety percent black Africans that had lived there for millenia, of course).
Because Maurice (who died in 1939) was seen as a pro-Treaty supporter (he became a Senator), the house was burned by anti-treaty forces in 1923 - probably by Volunteers who would never had the chance to be born either Irish or at all if it hadn't been for Moore's grandfather. When George Moore died, the land passed to the Irish Land Commission and there has been a campaign locally to restore the house. Here is a record of Dail questions posed by a local TD to the then Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands a few years ago wondering about the progress of the study into the restoration. Ironically, that minister was Síle De Valera, grand-daughter of Eamonn De Valera, the leader of the Anti-Treaty forces that burned down the house decades earlier.
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The plaque reads "KILTOOM Burial Place of the Moores of Moore Hall. This Catholic patriot family is honoured for their famine relief and their refusal to barter principles for English gold. Erected by Ballyglass Coy, old I.R.A. 1964". The text was chosen by the last of the Moores, Maurice Rory Moore (son of Col. Maurice Moore) who died in 1964.