The town of Kinsale has long been accepted - especially by itself - as the very model of modern tourism enterprise. It may be seen as appropriate therefore that Kinsale's Urban District Council, in allowing the building of a five-storey, 190bed hostel directly overlooking the ancient church of St Multose, is declaring its allegiance to the modern cult of religion as tourism. With an aplomb astonishing in an Irish context it is also announcing its ignorance of - or indifference to - the liturgical significance of church architecture in which the east wall and window over the communion table are crucially aligned to the doctrine of resurrection.
"Put not thy trust in princes, nor in any child of man, for there is no help in them," is the lesson of Psalm 146 and one which the parishioners of St Multose are discovering to their cost to be all too true of Kinsale. They might have thought that their church was as immune to urban desecration as any other church in the town. They might also have relied on the gospels of the County Development Plan, the Kinsale Development Plan, Bord Failte and the acknowledgement by An Foras Forbairthe that St Multose, on a site where a church has stood since the sixth century, is one of the three buildings in the town of international importance.
The church authorities in the person of Canon David Williams, Rector of St Multose, believed in the legend of Kinsale's architectural discretion. The town flaunts its sophistication and its cosmopolitan lifestyle might be expected to include a relatively light cultural responsibility. The church's guardians assumed that the proposed hotel on the Guardwell location backing on to the church would be set at the same unobtrusive angle as the bakery which used to be there: this slanted away from the graveyard wall and did not overshadow the church itself.
Pious expectation
When the terms of the planning permission became clear it was too late to do anything but mount a campaign for a change in the plans. But even then the pious expectation was that a town with pretensions to exemplary conservation standards would recognise the error of the decision and changes would be made.
Although by now both the Bishop of Cork Cloyne and Ross, Rev Roy Warke, and the Bishop of Cork and Ross, Rev Michael Buckley, have joined the local parish priest and the Carmelite Prior in Kinsale to protest at the UDC's decision, no change is proposed. Cork County Council, in the person of planning officer Billy Houlihan, is anything but sorry for a decision which was based on his recommendation to the UDC - a decision which means that services in the busy and beautiful church will be vulnerable to the comings and goings, usages and habits of those staying in the balconied rooms immediately outside and above it.
Billy Houlihan is robust in his assertion that he recommended the Falcon Holdings application to the council in his report on the proposal. "Certainly I'm in favour of the application," he says. "Certainly!" But he is reluctant to discuss its implications for the church, referring me to the UDC. While current action on the issue there consists of an exchange of letters between the legal representatives of the Representative Church Body and the council, no move, says the UDC, has been made to change the layout of the design.
Polite letters
The Church of Ireland is damned by its own politeness. With a good cause for a holy war the parishioners, who must feel that their work in caring for this hugely important element in the local tourist trade has been completely ignored, are stoical to a Spartan degree. Polite letters have been sent to many people and organisations who might be considered to have some interest in Kinsale, St Multose, tourism, conservation and religious observance; but apart from the efforts of the Representative Church Body and the despairing - but still courteous - private endeavours of the vestry and churchwardens, all their pleas are like those seeds that fell on stony ground.
Despite the increasingly ramshackle nature of the current architectural "upgrading" of Kinsale, which is suffering an unmitigated plague of PVC replacement windows, the town still has a core of real merit. St Multose stands at the heart of that heritage. But it is also a place of active modern worship, alive and important to its congregation. Its walls, pews, floors and galleries carry the history of the town. Laden with armourial bearings and hatchments, regimental flags of the Highland Light Infantry carried at the Battle of Waterloo, simple family inscriptions and the "happy bags" which keep modern infants quiet during services, St Multose embodies an irreplaceable heritage covering 1400 uninterrupted years.
Here in 1588 the townspeople gave thanks for deliverance from the Spanish Armada; here imprisoned American sailors worshipped during their War of Independence. A memorial commemorates playwright Lennox Robinson. Another remembers the Chudleighs, father and son, shipwrights who "caused a ship to be sailed on land . . . The capture of Ross Castle, with difficulty, proves it."
Mason's thumbprint
The sculpted reredos, retrieved from the graveyard, was used by Evie Hone as a model for her windows at Eton College Chapel. Windows by Gordon Webster of the Mackintosh School in Glasgow and Kate O'Brien of An Tur Gloinne are among the commemorative donations through history to the present day, including the parchment text illustrated by Elizabeth Friedlander to mark the installation of floodlighting.
St Multose himself stands in his niche over the West Door. In the wall beneath is the mason's mark with its thumbprint to prove he was a right-handed mason. The stone archway still holds the scratches made by soldiers sharpening arrowheads or more recently by the swords of Cromwell's garrison in the church. Even the pew graffiti depicting the 18th-century sailing ships in the harbour and etched by generations of bored soldiers and sailors have been preserved.
Now the church's its rites of worship have been denigrated by the actions of the town's guardians. For a little while yet the five-light stained glass east window opens on the sky, catching the sun's radiance in that promise of eternity to which Christians still adhere. Once building begins, this oldest functioning parish church in Ireland will lose that radiance, if not that promise.