Reconstruction of St Mel’s in Longford documented by RTÉ

When a fire gutted the interior of St Mel’s Cathedral in Longford town on Christmas Day five years ago, some priceless artefacts were burned to cinders.

Included was much of the 1,000-year-old wooden crozier of St Mel, the saint who gave his name to the neo-classical style building whose foundation stone was laid in 1840.

The fire broke out in a chimney flue in the cathedral’s heating system some time between midnight mass and 5 o’clock on Christmas morning 2009.

Temperatures of up to 1,100 degrees were reached as the blaze spread rapidly from under a wooden floor to the height of the beams and into the roof over the building. Damage was catastrophic. The roof was gone, the floor collapsed into a crypt below, and marble fittings melted.

Paintings, tapestries and statues were destroyed while just a few yards from the centre of the blaze a remarkable picture survived. A painting of the Holy Family, which had been hanging at an altar in a side aisle and was relatively unscathed.

Ronan Moore, senior project manager at the redevelopment of St Mel's, said it should have been one of the first canvasses to be set alight. "We will never know how it survived," he recalls in a an RTÉ documentary on the restoration of St Mel's, to be aired on RTÉ One television on Tuesday night.

It is presented by RTÉ’s midlands correspondent Ciarán Mullally.

Former Bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise Colm O’Reilly has described the survival of the Holy Family painting as a miracle.

Now retired he was 73 and heartbroken as fire destroyed the cathedral five years ago.

“It was an horrendous experience to watch it dying before my eyes” he says in Tuesday’s documentary, “but one thing was clear even at that stage - it was impossible to save it”.

Spending € 30million on renovating St Mel’s in the middle of one of Ireland’s worst ever recessions was a decision he could never have taken, were it not for the insurance coverage the cathedral had.

Bringing St Mel’s to its current glory was a titanic job. The main work involved replacing 26 gigantic limestone pillars from the centre aisles of the old cathedral.

“We had to painstakingly remove every one of them and replace them with new stone” Ronan Moore recalls in the documentary. “Each weighed something like five tonnes.”

With no floor, no roof and the 26 hand-carved limestone columns which supported the structure effectively destroyed, a system was devised which allowed restoration work proceed on three levels at the same time.

Over 675 tonnes of native blue limestone from Leighlin, Co Carlow, was installed – for the columns, the hand-carved window surrounds, pilasters, and for replacement corbels for the bell tower, which also sustained some damage.

To get this amount of limestone in the sizes required, meant 10,400 tonnes had to be quarried.

The Longford Phoenix, a Would You Believe special documentary, will be broadcast on RTÉ One television at 6.30pm on Tuesday, 30th December.