Alliance Support Group

Survivors of Abuse in Residential Institutions


RECENT NEWS:

Church not the only loser in fallout from tragic Limerick man�s death
— 22 Apr 06

Suicide victim had begged Taoiseach to launch probe
— 22 Apr 06

Comiskey set to avoid ordination of his successor
— 22 Apr 06

Moving scenes at prayer service for sex abuse victims
— 21 Apr 06

Bishop details sequence of meetings to discuss abuse claim
— 21 Apr 06

For older news items, please visit the news archives.

Sisters still say no surrender to the spreading concrete sprawl

By Tom Hayes, December 18, 2005

Sunday December 18th 2005


FIVE aging women live in a convent built, rebuilt, extended and extended again to house at least one hundred nuns.

Around them is the enormous clutter of classrooms, yards, corridors, annexes, stairways inside and out, railings, ramps and playgrounds.

Most of them empty now, the rest emptying.

Immediately beneath their windows lie the convent garden and cemetery.

The entire complex rises in tiers between the bordering streets - Douglas Street below, Evergreen Street above.

It is a relic of that devout vocation which brought Nano Nagle home to Cork from Paris, to live in a garret until her sisters in religion could join her crusade to educate the poor of Cork city.

What began then in these streets is ending now, more than 200 years later. They have done the State some service. The closure of the South Presentation Convent as a school does not mean the end of the Presentation Order itself, even in Cork.

There are still sisters working in its other schools, although most prefer to live as members of the wider community, and their work is no longer confined to teaching.

The Presentation Congregation in Ireland has contracted to a central base in Monasterevin, while its international structure links its provinces throughout the world. But Cork, with these red sandstone buildings in Douglas Street, was the mother house.

Nano Nagle herself lies in the small crypt near the neat rows of headstones in the graveyard.

She lies, in fact, in what Cork's construction industry would consider a prime slice of real estate in the city centre, a location of unique potential and profitability.

Already, the adjoining monastery on Douglas Street has been converted into flats, while the streets all around are thick with apartment buildings layered among the remaining houses, workshops, toolsheds and pubs.

Those new apartment blocks brought nothing to the convent or its schools; city planning saw no social reason to insist on two or three bedroom units to accommodate families, or to provide gardens to accommodate children.

So there were no new families and no new children from which the schools might draw their pupils and ensure their future. Yet this is the motherhouse.

The Presentation Congregation knows very well what it could do with the money any sale of this property might raise, but it has decided not to sell - or at least not all of it, and not yet.

Instead. they have begun to work with the Cork City Council on a conservation and development plan which, if appropriately designed and completed, could lead to a regeneration of the entire neighbourhood.

Of course, both the sisters and the council want this kind of outcome: the snag is that the sisters, like so many congregations across Europe, want to preserve the spiritual and social evidence of their original presence in Cork - and of their long commitment to their own vows and to the city itself.

As it happens, one of the convent buildings is the venue for an international exhibition on the theme of Converting Sacred Spaces, exploring different ways of ensuring the preservation of religious and historical values of sites which have outlived their original function.

The European Interreg Programme aims to counter the threat of dismemberment, and even disappearence that is hanging over these sacred sites.

The artist Tacita Dean has made a film about the life of the nuns still living in the convent: its long views of the gardens, the kitchens, the arcs of light through coloured windows on empty corridors end with a closing vista which recalls the conservation report, ". . . on the whole its character is that of a secret citadel, cloistered from the city bustle".

For the five sisters living companionably in the convent still, there must be, above all, the satisfaction of knowing that that their work is done and on a scale immeasurably greater than that imagined by Nano Nagle.

The film Presentation Sisters continues at the South Presentation Convent (Evergreen Street hall) until Saturday, December 31, Tues-Sat 12-6pm.

Mary Leland


� Irish Independent

Home |About Us |Our Services |Online Resources | Family Tracing | News |Forum |Donate |Contact Us