FEATURE: Ballina’s great convent revival

THERE was a time when church buildings were the focal points of every community in Mayo. That is still the case in many rural areas.

But the year is 2025, not 1965. Mass goers are now a minority, and the Catholic Church is fading from public consciousnesses as fast as its centuries-old churches, cathedrals, monasteries and convents.

Many of these great buildings are ruined or rotting. Ballina’s Convent of Mercy was somewhere in between until a group of volunteers intervened a few years ago.

On Easter Sunday 2024, the faithful of Killala diocese received the news that the Sisters of Mercy had gifted their old home to Ballina Convent Regeneration CLG.

With limited public funding and thousands of man-hours, the convent has now been restored well enough for a partial reopening. Though not fully revived, enough wood rot and water ingress were routed to facilitate a small community gathering in the old refectory last Christmas.

INTERVENTION

IT IS hoped – and likely – that this won’t be the last such communal gathering in the Convent of Mercy, which closed in December 2008.

Indeed, had the Sisters of Mercy not so trustfully and generously handed over the building and had the community not stepped up, the convent would have met a slow, sorry, demise.

Speaking to The Mayo News during our most recent visit to the north Mayo capital, Cllr Mark Duffy, Chair of Ballina Convent Regeneration, underscored how urgent the situation had become: “The engineers identified that the roof would collapse within ten years if we didn’t intervene.”

The building had been vacant for well over a decade when Sr Phyllis Surlis phoned Cllr Duffy to voice her concerns. Experts from UCD and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, visited the convent and formed the view that the building could still be saved.

“We then began a series of discussions with the Sisters of Mercy,” Cllr Duffy explains. “They eventually made the decision to gift it to the diocesan trust in Ballina. The diocesan trust felt that it was a bit of a liability because of the challenges that the building faces with regeneration.”

The convent was entrusted to Ballina Convent Regeneration, and in 2024, locals tore the first piece of rotting plywood from the windows, allowing ventilation and sunlight to enter its condensation-ridden halls for the first time in 16 years – a long time, indeed, but a short time in the life of a building that has stood stately on McDermott Street since 1867.

A NEW HOME

THE story of the building begins when the Sisters of Mercy were formed by Catherine McCauley in Dublin in 1831. Their principal aims were to educate poor girls, lodge and maintain poor women who were in danger, and visit the sick and the poor.

The sisters first came to Ballina from Sligo on October 14, 1851. In his book, ‘Dear Old Ballina’, Terry Reilly writes that their decision to establish a presence in the North Mayo town followed ‘many requests from Very Rev Patrick Malone, the Ballina Administrator, who was anxious to improve social and education standards in the aftermath of the dreadful famine’.

On December 8, 1851, the Sisters of Mercy took charge of the female national school, where four sisters taught 330 pupils.

Almost 12 years later, on September 13, 1863, the foundation stone was laid for what was first called the Sisters of All-Hallows Convent, a building designed by renowned English ecclesiastical architect George Goldie.

On May 3, 1867, after many years verging on privation, the sisters moved into their convent. They called it home for the next 141 years.

Delivered for £1,900 gathered from loans and fundraising in America, the convent sits upon a splendid vantage today known as Convent Hill.

“The convent is on a commanding position from which views of the country for miles around may be obtained, and even of Foxford on a clear day,” one commentator said in an Evening Freeman report published eight days after the nuns took up lodgings.

“From one side the town is seen lying underneath. From another side the far-extending and beautiful woods and groves of Belleek, while yet from another, Lough Con appears, and the pretty-looking white houses of Lord Arran’s property in the distance. A finer site could not have been selected.”

BRIGHT FUTURE

The Sisters of Mercy stood with Ballina through truly dark times. They educated the poor, reared orphans and provided relief to thousands when state support was almost non-existent and destitution lay around every corner.

In their early years in Ballina, the sisters were stationed in the workhouse and also ran the local district hospital. For many years they also ran a boarding school for girls in the northern wing of the convent. It later closed in the 1880s, to make way the new St Mary’s Intermediate School, which provided secondary education for local girls.

In 1939, the nuns opened the now boarded-up St Mary’s Secondary School in a building separate to the convent. There, the school – which only appointed its first lay principal in 2004 – educated the girls of Ballina and beyond until 2022, when the school moved into another new building just a few hundred yards away.

Last November, the old school building hit the headlines when its private owners lodged a Section 5 declaration to Mayo County Council for the building to be used as ‘temporary accommodation for displaced persons seeking international protection’. However, the Department of Integration later said it was not considering using the school for such purposes.

As a result of the ensuing confusion, the convent, in the words of Cllr Mark Duffy, got ‘caught in the crossfire of a very poorly managed immigration policy’, with its image attached to social-media posts voicing opposition to international protection applicants being housed on the 2.5-hectare site.

Two Fridays ago, several windows in the convent – including priceless stained glass – were smashed during an incident that is now the subject of a Garda investigation.

That has not stopped Ballina Convent Regeneration from progressing its plans to make the convent a thriving community space for the town once more.

“We want this to be a force for good for the community,” says Cllr Duffy, “to support those most in need, to create places for music, rehearsals, art, culture, faith, museum space, garden space, community space. It can be so many different things, and it can be a hive of activity.”

TRUST

MAYO County Council acquired the Convent of Mercy in Westport in 2008 and has yet to lay a shovel into it. A charity in Ballina had their convent back open in less than 12 months. The key difference between a convent given over to a state body and one entrusted to a community organisation?

“It’s all about trust, and that’s the most valuable currency in this whole process,” says Cllr Duffy. “The sisters trusted us and we have leveraged all the goodwill in the community, whether it’s sponsorship of some of the equipment or the different professional contractors who basically carried out work, pro bono – incredibly generous.”

Ballina looks very different today from the town The Evening Freeman visited in 1867. But words penned towards the end of the aforementioned article could easily be written in 2025.

“Everything that it was possible to obtain in town was obtained there, and no other labour we believe that was employed on the building than that which was locally afforded. In this respect, the promoters of the building showed a spirit and patriotism very rare in this country, generally where everything is held to increase in value and importance in proportion as local men have nothing to do with it. But they have their reward.”

So say the people of Ballina.

• To find out more about the Ballina Convent Regeneration project, visit www.ballinaconvent.com.