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.