Cathedral starting to make a bit of history for itself

There’s none of us getting any younger. The years do fly. And, as if to prove the point, I recently dropped into the Cathedral, only to recall from an audio-visual which was playing in a side chapel that the 50th anniversary of its opening is rapidly approaching.

It continues to be one of the most enduring centres for visitors, though I think you will still get a sharp split of opinion as to its magnificence, the sheer scale of the building, and its architectural mix.

That criticism was there from the day it opened. Back then, the debate about its scale and its grandiose nature – for a building completed in the 1960s – was rife. The controversy was often not too far removed from the all-pervasive figure of its chief architect, Bishop Michael Browne.

In the light of the passage of time, perhaps the controversy on the sheer scale of thinking may have been tempered – a little like the fact that Charlie Haughey spent €27 million on restoring Government Buildings, but their style and beauty now surely show that, occasionally, we might think on a grand scale.

What has brought this to mind is the steady daily stream of visitors from all over the world to the Cathedral. The building is gradually acquiring a feeling of ‘history’ which can only come from the passage of years. Nearly 50 years have matured what was so new and so brash in its apparent triumphalism in 1965.

For instance, ‘history’ reverberates from the very stones in St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church, because of its age. It has an extraordinary quiet about it, and there is such fascination in all those monuments, tablets and plaques on the walls.

They conjure up pictures of far-flung lands, of people dying of fevers associated with other climates, and of the utter carelessness with millions of lives, including many an Irish lad, in the face of the machine guns of World War I.

This practice of memorials seems to be only beginning in Galway Cathedral – though there is that initial one to the people who were executed on the site when it was the Galway Gaol. There is also that small bust of Michael Browne in a side chapel, bearing the legend that he was a bishop from 1937 to 1979.

The plaques in the Collegiate Church are infinitely more varied – to people fallen in war and to those who died in other foreign fields. They always remind me of the ceaseless fascination to be found in the statues, plaques and tombs of Westminster Abbey.  

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.