Kingscourt celebrates refurbishment of church

Hundreds of parishoners turned out in Kingscourt on Sunday for the rededication and blessing of the 140-year-old Church of the Immaculate Conception in Kingscourt which has undergone a programme of refurbishment. The parish has come a long way since those days when Mass was celebrated in a mud wall house on a site which was granted on a peppercorn rent. A Fr Bermingham built a proper church in 1812. The apse of this building is still standing today and is situated on St Mary's Road and is now used as an entrance to the present church. Its foundation stone was laid on 25th July 1869. The Church of Immaculate Conception was opened in 1872 when Fr Peter O'Reilly was parish priest. William Hague, one of the leading architects of his time, designed the church. In 1946, Fr Marry commissioned Evie Hone, one of the best artists working in stained glass in Ireland at the time, to design a window depicting scenes from Apparition of Our Lady at Fatima in 1917. The next windows to be commissioned were two sets from Harry Clarke Studios. The project to install the rose window during the Jubilee year 2000 when Monsignor Sean Heaney was parish priest was conceived as a paying tribute to the sacrifices and generosity of those, who in times of hardship, contributed to the building of the church. In spring of 2010, Niall Smith, a parishoner who is also an architect, was appointed to head up a design team for the refurbishment of the church. Major works included restoration of the roof, completion of the bell tower and spire, major upgrading of electrical and mechanical systems, the installation of a state-of-the-art closed-circuit broadcast system, and other works including disabled access routes, cleaning and repointing of the stonework.