Brendan Hoban: Cathedral is still the jewel in Ballina’s crown
Western People 26.11.24
Last year when President Joe Biden visited Ballina and, from outside St Muredach’s Cathedral, addressed thousands of people encircled at every possible vantage-point around the loop of the two bridges, I thought of those who at a time of endemic, overwhelming poverty had dreamed of building a cathedral in Ballina.
Almost two hundred years ago – in two years’ time, in 2027, the cathedral celebrates its bicentenary – on a wintery May day the then archbishop of Tuam, Oliver Kelly, laid the foundation stone. The previous evening, Kelly had arrived in Ballina – as The Ballina Impartial reported – ‘on a handsome Pheaton (carriage) drawn by two ponies of exquisite beauty, and so admirably matched, that the most discriminating eye could scarcely point out a show of difference’. He stayed overnight in the Tyrawley Hotel (more recently the Greyhound Inn) and participated in a High Mass at noon the following day.
Plans to process the short distance from the Ardnaree chapel to the site of the new cathedral were delayed until 3.00pm by ‘a series of heavy showers’ when the procession of 24 priests, three bishops, numerous altar-boys, the architect, Dominic Madden, the contractor and sundry other officials moved to the new site. Prayers and rituals ‘ordained by the Rubric of the Roman Catholic Church’ were said and the archbishop blessed the foundation stone which is now over the front door of the cathedral – though the date is incorrect!
When President Biden addressed the crowd from a platform in front of the cathedral, the foundation stone reminded me of those who had gathered on that May day in 1827 and what they could possibly make of the President of the United States of America and the entourage that had accompanied him from the New World.
I wondered too what the real architect and driving force behind the cathedral, Bishop John MacHale, without whose vision and purpose the cathedral would not have been built until centuries later, would have thought! And all those who over the years had a role in building what is now, by common consent, Ballina’s signature building.
The original idea of building a cathedral came from Peter Waldron, bishop of Killala (1814-24). The year was 1822 and Waldron wanted a replacement for, in his own words, the ‘miserably small, squalid chapel in Ardnaree’, then the only Catholic Church in the parish.
A committee was appointed, collections were held, plans were drawn up but Waldron, in fragile health for some years (and unable even to attend the laying of the foundation stone) lacked the energy to drive the project.
The arrival in 1824 of Lahardane native, John MacHale, as coadjutor bishop – up to then a professor of theology in Maynooth College – changed the whole landscape. MacHale was just 34 at the time, full of energy and of ideas and Waldron effectively handed over the cathedral project to him. MacHale was the right man in the right place at the right time. Originally a site was acquired on the other side of the Moy – what is now Walsh St – but MacHale had his eye on the present site and cajoled the landlord into parting with it. He sought funds within the diocese from priests and people and outside the diocese by way of direct contribution or through sponsorship. He even went to Rome in 1831 hoping to get a contribution from the pope but he had to make do with the gift of a chalice – now resting in the Tuam archives!
There were criticisms of the cathedral project, specifically what seemed a strange decision – to build a cathedral in one parish in a diocese of 24 parishes with very few churches, apart from a number of thatched cabins around which people gathered to attend Mass. But MacHale believed that a cathedral would encourage the building of parish churches, even though much of the money to achieve that end had been siphoned into the cathedral project. No doubt too, in the years leading up to Catholic Emancipation (1829), MacHale was aware of the need to make a clear statement that the Catholic Church was alive and well, despite the poverty of its members and the persecution of their faith in ‘Penal Times’.
By any estimate, the cathedral was a stunning achievement. One of the first cathedrals built in rural Ireland in modern times (years before Tuam cathedral) it must have seemed to the people one of the wonders of the world: its impressive site; its architectural design; its exquisite ceiling based on the Chapel of the Minerva in Rome; its splendid mosaic in the sanctuary; the stained glass windows executed and installed by Franz Mayer & Co, Munich & London; its carved fonts; and its beautifully appointed interior with the original confessionals, baptistry, mosaic walls and Bernard Lyster’s carpentry work.
The historian, Emmet Larkin, described it as ‘one of the more remarkable achievements in pre-Famine Ireland’: ‘The accomplishment consisted in not merely that the cathedral was so aesthetically pleasing in terms of its structure and site, but that such an architectural monument could be raised in what was the poorest part of Ireland and apparently daily becoming even more poor.’
In 1834, Bishop John MacHale, the dynamic force behind the cathedral, was appointed Archbishop of Tuam and by this time the building was roofed even though there was as yet no glass in the windows! However, MacHale had used his trip to Rome in 1831 to acquire a beautiful new altar as well as 14 Stations of the Cross and other artefacts that were used in time to complete the interior and are still extant to this day.
It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century, because of the Great Famine and other difficulties not least the perennial poverty of the people, before the cathedral was completed – in all about 70 years since the blessing of the foundation stone in 1827.