St. Patrick’s Church in Ballyroan, Co. Laois, has been reopened after refurbishment costing €600,000.
Kildare and Leighlin diocesan administrator Monsignor Brendan Byrne,
along with PP Fr Ger Ahern and Fr Patrick Kehoe concelebrated the
service of rededication.
The church has been the place of worship for
the people of Ballyroan for 170 years, with minor adjustments made
internally in 1988 to comply with liturgical requirements arising from
the Second Vatican Council.
A survey of the church two years ago recommended substantial
renovations and re-ordering and work began last September with
Mountmellick firm Garoon Construction Ltd. as chief contractor.
The
original stained glass windows have been cleaned and re-leaded, a
complete internal re-ordering and refurbishment of the building was
undertaken and the church’s pipe organ was restored.
“It’s an old church and while it’s modern in design, we kept the sense of old,” said Fr Ahern.
Re-leading the windows was, he remarked, a “huge amount of work,
because each piece had to be removed individually.”
Fr Ahern said he
was confident weekly collections, a parish lotto and other small
fund-raising events would pay the parish’s outstanding debts on the
project in a few years and remarked, “The people of Ballyroan have risen
to the occasion.”
“It has been a place of worship for the people of Ballyroan for 170
years and I pray that it will continue to be,” he went on, saying he
hoped the revamp of the church would “bring a renewal of faith.”
The parish’s initial plans ran into heavy weather last year with the
planners and they had to go back to drawing board but managed to get it
back on track.
The church is a listed building and the project was
delayed by concerns of Department of the Environment (DoE) officials
that the original plans submitted by Ballyroan “would involve
unnecessary loss and disturbance of the historic fabric" of the 170-year
old church.
Laois County Council had approved the parish’s plans to re-point the
church’s bell tower, install a new altar, restore the windows and
re-locate the baptismal fount, but imposed conditions on how the work
should be carried out.
DoE officials went further and said that cleaning and re-pointing the
church’s stonework could cause "irreversible damage" if it were not
properly done and warned that damp–proofing could be destructive to the
character of the building.
They also criticised proposals to remove
the church’s stain glass windows for restoration, to lower the chancel
floor, and relocate mosaic flooring.
The parish had to provide reassurance on these issues before its plans were given the green light.