The sale of playing fields at Clonkeen College (Irish Times, "Christian
Brothers to sell Clonkeen playing fields for €26m," July 16th) continues a
recent trend of dishonesty in land ownership by the Catholic religious orders
and several of the Catholic dioceses. The Catholic Church owns many many
thousands of acres of land across Ireland, much of it left in trust to them by
wealthy Catholic landowners after the lifting of penal laws. Must assuredly the
previous owners of the land would never have agreed to such endowments if they
knew that the orders would simply use these properties as slush funds, with
large tracts being sold to property developers whenever an abuse scandal raised
its head.
There is an urgent need for the land already in the
hands of the church to be regulated for the community use it was obviously
intended for. The playing fields at Clonkeen College were never intended for
property development, and this is just one example of hundreds of dubious
property deals being done behind closed doors by secretive agents of orders,
dioceses, and mysterious "trusts."
The communications director of the Christian Brothers
in 2008 promised that the Clonkeen playing fields would remain as long as
Clonkeen College existed. We now know how valuable his word was.
Irish towns and cities desperately need more open
space for community use, and the church is sitting on land which it sees as
nothing more than a big piggy bank. It would be wonderful to see this land
being set aside for us, and not just the developers.
I would suggest that this is the perfect time for the
various branches of the Catholic Church, in consultation with the state, to
take stock of the land they own in Ireland and introduce binding legal
safeguards for that land's continuing availability to the people of Ireland.
