Are they, then, to become things of the past, the old churches? Relics of a community of faith which no longer exists? asks Mary Leland
It may have been at the Church of Ireland Synod that the scale and imminence of the problem facing that body was described recently, but the Catholic Hierarchy too is aware that it will shortly have to deal with a multiplicity of churches in the care of a diminishing population of church-goers. It was at the synod that the Right Rev Paul Colton, Bishop of Cork, pointed out the strange irony.
The irony is twofold: firstly that these buildings have to be listed at all, given that their usage, history and venerability should protect them; and secondly that once listed for preservation they impose additional charges on their proprietors - which usually means their parish or diocesan congregation.
Conscience and coffers
Just as there seems little public acknowledgement just yet that Dúchas the Heritage Service is going to have a mammoth headache in a few years' time when all the houses and landscapes designated for "the State" actually fall into the State's lap, so this country seems slow to grasp the implications for its coffers as well as its conscience of the gentle slide of so many church buildings into decline and even dereliction.
There is a church at Castlehyde near Fermoy, for example, long deserted by its parishioners and long robbed of its ironwork, leading, slating, glazing and decorative stonework and left with nothing but its graves. Not a ruin, but ruinous, one of religion's skeletons, but associated with the family of Dr Douglas Hyde, Ireland's first President.
It's not that the faithful and their clergy don't care about these churches. They care passionately, vehemently, and usually fruitlessly. But they care alone - even the Representative Church Body, trustees or owners of so much Church of Ireland property, can't manage this huge portfolio of abandoned houses of God. It does its best - the sale of St Nicholas's Church in Cork a couple of years ago seemed to follow quickly on its deconsecration, but in fact this historic building has since been sold again and is just one more accumulation of commercial square metres by now.
And what is to happen to St Luke's Church at Montenotte? Sky-high and steepled with red and white sandstone on its hill, W.H. Hill's Romanesque design (the contractor was John Sisk) dates from 1889 and is centred on a site of Christian devotion traced back to the 7th century. It is soon to be closed for worship, its remaining parishioners transferring to the equally ancient ambience of St Anne's, Shandon.
St Luke's is the third church on this cliff-side above the city quays; the first was named for St Brendan the Navigator, and through the centuries sailors came here to give thanks for their safe return from their voyages. For generations the church tithes and income from its lands were used to support the leper hospital at Glanmire, and its burial ground at Ballinamocht or Mayfield.
Grand houses
A few of the remaining gardens of the grand houses still standing in Montenotte hold some hints of that first foundation in their old walls, witness to the changes wrought in earlier ages, when the northside population became so numerous that the present church of St Luke's was built as a chapel of ease to St Anne's, Shandon.
Later generations saw St Luke's become the centrepiece of the weekly Church Parade from nearby Collins Barracks. Sparsely decorated inside, it has no regimental connotations as the barracks has its own church, but its raked seating (for 2,000 people), arched nave, fine barrel-vaulted roof, the chancel lined with engraved steel panels of wheatsheafs and fruiting vines, all speak of a prosperous and optimistic community. Each of the numbered pews is fitted on the aisle with brass rails and drip-trays for Sunday middle-class umbrellas, offering the silent details of how people lived and prayed. But in this parish of St Luke's only 64 households or 154 individuals now constitute the congregation, and 36 of them are living in St Luke's Home across the river in Mahon.
Sir Walter Raleigh
All over Ireland this pattern is repeated - most urgently, for example, in Youghal, where the ancient Collegiate Church of St Mary declaims a provenance from the Normans, where Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, lies buried, where Spenser worshipped as did Sir Walter Raleigh, where the FitzGerald factions laid such waste that another FitzGerald faction had to set all to rights again; a national monument, officially, but an enormous charge on a dwindling and beleaguered community.
And of course it's not just churches. People in listed houses everywhere will have to reassess their commitment to keeping their property in the condition demanded by the new legislation. Welcome this may be in terms of heritage policy, but its implication, unless supported by very generous grants, will be, literally, ruinous.