The Sisters of Mercy at the Mater Hospital start a new chapter in an environmentally friendly convent.
The Mater Hospital on the northside of Dublin city was established by the Sisters of Mercy order in 1852 to fulfil their founder Catherine MacAuley's dream of a hospital for the poor.
Today the Mater is one of the busiest hospitals in the country. The religious community behind it consists of twenty five women, six of whom still work in the hospital.
Sister Eugene Nolan who is a member of the nursing staff team says the history of the Mater reflects the history of Dublin. Her predecessors’ care for the sick meant that people who were ill were,
Respected and brought into a beautiful building.
The sisters donated their convent to make room for the Mater Hospital expansion and have embraced a new smaller home, tucked into a corner of the campus at the intersection of the North Circular Road and Berkeley Road.
New beginnings are times of transition but the order is aware of future needs, and the new building is part of the plan. The Sisters of Mercy may be an ageing order, but Director of Vision at the Mater Hospital, Sr Margherita Rock says,
We are all very young at heart.
As Della O’Donoghue and Philip Crowe from architecture firm MCO Projects explain that the Sisters of Mercy’s ethos of sustainability and care for the earth resulted in an unobtrusive building with a reduced ecological footprint.
A new space brings a new atmosphere which chaplain Sr Mary Flynn describes as,
New life, new hope.
This episode of 'Capital D’ was broadcast on 27 April 2006. The reporter is Anne Cassin.
Capital D was a weekly magazine series which put Dubliners and their lives in the spotlight. Presented by Anne Cassin, it was presented from a different Dublin location each week. First broadcast on 29 September 2005, it ran until December 2012.
