Students to attend Kylemore Abbey under Notre Dame partnership

About 40 students from US university Notre Dame will attend summer classes at Kylemore Abbey in Connemara from 2016 under a new partnership with the Benedictine nuns who own the abbey.

The Indiana-based university, which has long-established ties with Ireland, is entering into a 30-year lease with the religious order to renovate about 8,000 square feet of space, almost a fifth of the abbey's overall floor space, for research and dormitory space for the students.

The Kylemore programme, running every July and August, will complement the university’s Dublin campus, where 2,500 students have passed through Notre Dame’s Irish studies programme at the Keough-Naughton centre on Merrion Square since its inception in 1998.

"It advances both the educational and spiritual mission of both entities – it is a mutual relationship," said Paul Browne, vice-president for communications at the university.

“It is also a part of Ireland that Notre Dame wants to expose our students and scholars to and not just to Dublin itself.”

Mr Browne declined to say how much Notre Dame was investing in the renovations but said that it would be “a significant investment” and that they would take into account the abbey’s historic importance.

The Notre Dame summer school will see the return of students to Kylemore Abbey six years after the nuns closed the boarding school they had run at their base in Connemara since the early 1920s.

Partnership

The partnership is being supported by businessman

Martin Naughton

, the owner of global electrical appliance manufacturer

Glen Dimplex

who has been a major benefactor of Notre Dame over the past 20 years. He is a member of the board of the university.

Ownership of the abbey will remain in the hands of the Kylemore Trust, controlled by the nuns. They moved into the 19th-century castle in 1920 after leaving their abbey in Ypres, Belgium in 1914, when the Flemish town was destroyed during the first World War.

Kylemore was built in 1867 by English doctor Mitchell Henry, who was later a Home Rule and Liberal MP for Co Galway.