Friday, August 19, 2011

Nuns’ chapel to become visitor centre

A County Kerry parish is to set up a visitor centre in a former nuns’ chapel to showcase the religious and secular history of the Ring of Kerry peninsula.

The centre will be developed in part of the Daniel O’Connell Memorial Church in Cahirciveen that is itself undergoing an ambitious restoration project, including the completion of a spire that was planned over a century ago but never erected.

Parish priest Fr William Crean said the nuns’ chapel will house an “interactive exhibition that will tell four main stories.”

“It will tell the story of (Daniel) O’Connell, the story of building the church under the guidance of parish priest Tim Brosnan, the story of Hugh O’Flaherty, the Vatican Pimpernel, who is buried in the grounds, and the wider story of Christianity on the Iveragh peninsula, through religious sites such as Skellig Michael,” he explained.

Fr Crean said that while the project on the main church building had slowed down due to funding becoming less easy to source, he hoped the parish could push ahead with the visitor centre and begin work on it early next year.

“We have accessed some Ireland America funds and some European funding,” he revealed.

And the Kerry diocese is very supportive of the visitor centre proposal and this also helped to make it possible to proceed with it, said Fr Crean.  

“The Kerry Parochial Trust is like a credit union and makes funds available to us at a reasonable rate,” he explained.

The parish had initially planned to establish the visitor centre in a former mortuary chapel, but after it became apparent that the space there was too small, decided to house it instead in the Nun's Chapel, which was used up to the mid 1990s by nuns in the town  as a separate place of prayer. 

Daniel O’Connell, the great nineteenth century Irish politician and campaigner for - among other things – Catholic Emancipation was born in Derrynane near Cahirciveen.  

When the church was being built half a century after the O’Connell era, the PP of the time, Canon Timothy Brosnan, was such an admirer of O’Connell that he honoured his memory by naming the church after him.

Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty was also born in the area and became a Vatican official who was known to be instrumental in saving thousands of Jews in Rome during World War Two.