Qualla: St Mel's Cathedral

St Mel's Cathedral: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. It was the coldest Christmas in living memory in Longford. The first Mass of Christmas Day 2009 had ended just after midnight and the cathedral had emptied to the smell of incense and candle smoke. Sometime before dawn, hidden behind a fitted unit in the sacristy, an old chimney flue began to glow. By 5 a.m. the back of the building was on fire. Firefighters arrived to find their pipes frozen solid - the temperature outside was minus seven. By morning, one of the great Catholic cathedrals of nineteenth-century Ireland, the soaring landmark that Longford had grown up around for over a hundred and fifty years, was, as the chief fire officer put it, just a shell - burned out from end to end. And yet the story of St Mel's is not the story of its burning. It is the story of what happened next.

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Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Mel's Cathedral: Twenty-Four Limestone Columns

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnArmagh, Public domain. Construction had begun in 1840 in the lean years before the Famine and continued in the desperate ones during and after. The cathedral was built between 1840 and 1856, with later additions: a belfry designed by John Bourke in 1860 and a Greek-revival portico by George Ashlin adde...

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Image: JohnArmagh | Public domain

St Mel's Cathedral: Christmas Morning, 2009

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarkusMark, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bishop Colm O'Reilly arrived in the dark and watched the roof go. By daylight the damage was being estimated at thirty million euro. St Mel's Crosier - a relic over a thousand years old, named for the sixth-century saint who had given the diocese his name - was inside, and it was...

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Image: MarkusMark | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Mel's Cathedral: Hope from the Ashes

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mass moved into the sports hall and chapel of St Mel's College up the road. On 18 September 2011 - nearly two years after the fire - the cathedral ruins were opened to the public for one day. Thousands queued in the rain to walk through the roofless shell of the building that had...

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Mel's Cathedral: What a Cathedral Means

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 瑞丽江的河水, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk into St Mel's now and the building is older than it was on Christmas Eve 2009, and also entirely new. The plasterwork looks the same. The columns are the same Newtowncashel limestone. The proportions are exact. But the air smells of fresh paint and new wood, and the light is...

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Image: 瑞丽江的河水 | CC BY-SA 4.0