THE CHURCH where both the President Michael D Higgins and Taoiseach Enda Kenny were married has been reopened in a dedication ceremony that was attended by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin.
St Mary’s Church in Haddington Road, Dublin 4, closed for a €2 million refurbishment last May and remedial works included replacing the roof and the bell tower.
The roof was in such poor condition that a rotten beam in the sacristy threatened to bring the whole edifice down on the heads of parishioners.
Msgr Paddy Finn, who led the fundraising for the project over seven years, said they were fortunate that most of the fundraising was done during Celtic Tiger years as they could not raise the amounts of money involved nowadays.
The interior was also refurbished, including a series of winged angels by Harry Clarke.
The church, which has been called the second most important Catholic church in Dublin after the Pro-Cathedral, was packed for the occasion yesterday.
Archbishop Martin referred to the Celtic Tiger years in his homily which decried how quickly we had forgotten “how much all of us in our way celebrated empty celebrity in the days of prosperity in Ireland”.
He added: “We can easily become victims of the inadequacies and the deceptions of the culture in which we live. We can be trapped and fail to see the shallowness of many aspects of life.”
Mr Higgins and his wife Sabina were married in the church in 1974; Enda Kenny and his wife Fionnuala were married there in 1992.
