descamps

Imagine P.Jones having visions. What will we have next?

Gosh. That bird looks about as benign as Praxiteles.

Surely, all hate campaigns are unwarrented!!

The_Chris is just a little too partisan in all of this business and would be well to look at matters with a more steely eye – otherwise we will soon have a new saint in the heavens.

The problem with the Bishop of Cloyne, despite having spent nearly thirty years in Rome, is that he knows relatively little about art or architecture and is dependent on advisers who know even less. The project for the sanctuary of Cobh Cathedral is primarily the brain (!) child of one Denis Reidy, the Parish Priest of Carrigtwohill. He believes that he is reproducing in Cobh a solution that was adopted in the much vaster Cathedral of Milan and expects to have the plaudits of the plebs for this before he shuffels off his eccelsiastical coil in a few years time. When the Cobh project was first mooted, an advisory committee was formed basically of a few nuns and few of he more pliable members of the parish. What they knew about the building or its importance is debatable but they recommended a plan put before them by the good Reidy and catagorically excluded a number of less radical alternatives. When the ridiculousness of this was exposed in the letters page of the Irish Independent (23 December 1999) the project was temporarily shelved. A new advisory committee was formed, this time of several prominent artists, and charged with the task of advising Bishop Magee on what to do. Several of the artists, however, disagreed with the ethos of the advisory committee and resigned (among them Imogen Stuart and Ken Thompson). Eventually, a recommendation was made to Bishop Magee not so surprisingly recommending something very like the previous project. An art advisory committee unanimously accepted the proposal as did the Historic Churches Advisory Committe of the diocese of Cloyne. In their courtly rush to faun, neither of these bodies thought of asking to have a heritage impact study conducted on the impact of the proposed plan on the historic interior of the building. Another committee was formed to choose an architect to execute the plan and, not at all surprisingly, the architect chosen was Professor Cathal O’Neill. His appointment was recommended by the art and architecture committee of the diocese and by yet another body, the Cathedral Restoration Committee. With such a quiverfull of committees and experts, the poor advice-needy Bishop had no option but to go along with the Milan solution of D. Reidy. In all of this, no notice was taken of the common plebs of Cobh who would only be called upon to pay for the exercise.

A recent picture of the chancel in St. Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh.