Plans have been published for a new housing and care project for elderly people in Ennis, Co Clare, which is being built on a site worth €10 million which Bishop Willie Walsh of Killaloe has donated free of charge. A planning application has been lodged with Ennis Town Council for a day-care centre which will include a kitchen and dining area recreational facilities, clinical centre and bathrooms as well as six housing units and three semi-detached houses.
Last October, Bishop Walsh announced that his diocese was donating the 15-acre site beside the town’s Cahercalla Community Hospital to help provide specially-designed housing for Ennis’s burgeoning population of elderly people.
A specially appointed group, the Cuan an Clar Committee, was subsequently established to oversee the development and has now embarked on a campaign to raise the necessary €2m to proceed with building the elderly housing development.
The Committee’s planning advisors, Hassett Leyden and Associates have now lodged the application and a decision by the Town Council is expected by the end of the year.
It is hoped that the day care centre will cater for sixty people and take pressure off acute hospitals, by providing the elderly with good quality residential and daycare services and minimising admissions to hospitals and care institutions.
The most recent census showed there are some 1,300 elderly people living in Ennis, most of whom live alone, and the number of senior citizens in the town is expected to grow significantly further in the coming years.
The bishop’s decision to donate surplus prime real estate for the project has been described by Cuan an Clar’s chairperson Jackie Brown as “an unprecedented gesture of generosity”.
The bishop said that the Church holding a lot of land for itself was “not in any way part of the Gospel” and it had “an obligation to act responsibly” with such resources.
Dr Walsh said there was no room in any Church for “simply exploiting the market” and it had “an obligation to act in a responsible way in this regard”.
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