Locals worry the Meath Street grotto is about to lose what makes it so special

The sky over Austin Harte is wide and blue.

The sun beats down on his back as he sits alone on the bench opposite the grotto at Saint Catherine's Church off Meath Street on Friday, 27 June.

The grotto is important to him, like it’s important to other locals, he says.

He says he’s come here forever. “Since I was a young lad – I'm not telling me age now,” he says, and grins. 

Back in the day he came with his mother, he says. “She was very religious, very strict,” he says. “But, I mean, that's what people were, weren’t they? Like, you know, 50, 60, years ago … Churches would be full. They don't be full anymore.”

These days, Harte comes every Friday and thinks about his parents, he says. “Me mother. And me father.”

Here, he feels them. “It's their, kind of, history … You just come and pay your respects.” 

The grotto is a cave-like stone archway, made of unevenly shaped rocks, forming an alcove over rows of electric candles. Embedded in the side is Our Lady of Lourdes. 

Water trickles down from the grotto’s wall into a basin, where potted lavender and house plants, nestled snug between the crevices, get splashes of water.

There’s a stone from Lourdes that people touch as they go by. A fresh bouquet still in its plastic is at the base. 

The low lying roof of the Vicar Street music venue is visible behind the grotto, and the church to the left. 

To Harte’s right, an older trio share a bench: a woman with a walker, sat between two men. They say they’re old friends, here to visit her.

Opposite this group on the bench, a man and a woman in tracksuits sit silently. The man lights up a cigarette. They didn’t want to chat, he says.  

That’s how the grotto is supposed to be, locals said: quiet, private, peaceful.

Sitting on the bench, facing the grotto, Harte says, “Meath Street has changed so much over the years.” 

He brought up the new hotels and student accommodation complexes that have risen around the neighborhood. “It’s a lot,” he said.

More hotels

Now, two companies have planning permission to build two more hotels, right next to the grotto, rising up to eight storeys.

If built, the Molyneux Hotel would be directly to the south of the church, to the right of the grotto. 

The Vicar Street Hotel would be built just behind the grotto, where the current Vicar Street music venue peeks slightly into view.

“You can just barely see the top of Vicar Street now,” said long-time local Noel Fleming. “Well, that’s going to be nearly five storeys higher than it is now.”

Locals tried to fight these planning applications. 

In 2021, they passed around a petition protesting the Molyneux Hotel. 

Fleming said they got thousands of signatures in just two weeks, from all over the world through Facebook and other sources.

Later, the council’s Conservation Officer requested that Midsal Homes, the company behind the Molyneaux Hotel proposal, get a cultural heritage and conservation professional to do a heritage impact assessment of the development.

The grotto is “a place / structure of cultural and spiritual importance within the Liberties community”, they argued. The report should include “mitigation measures for potential impacts on the special interest of the Grotto”, they said.

But the planning officer overrode that, stating: “The principle of a hotel is firmly established … the external modifications are minor … the request is not considered reasonable.” 

Dozens of third-party submissions to both hotels’ planning applications raised concerns about their impacts on the grotto, many repeating the same lines:

“There is zero reference to the impact on the treasured oasis.”

“There may be no place left to go for solace.”

The only mandated mitigation is that the windows on Molyneux Hotel’s north-facing elevation – toward the grotto – must use frosted glass to protect privacy.

Visual renderings requested by residents, showing the hotels’ scale compared to the grotto, were not provided. 

Residents created their own, showing how the eight-storey buildings will tower over it.

“A monument to peace”

Almost a century after St Catherine’s Church was built in the mid-19th century, the grotto was added, says historian and local Cathy Scuffil.

It was dreamed up in the 1940s by Canon Francis Gleeson, a Catholic priest and chaplain in the First World War. 

He had seen the trauma of war firsthand, says Scuffil. She called the grotto a “monument to peace”.

There’s a painting of Gleeson in uniform hanging in Noel Fleming’s Noel’s Deli, on Meath Street. 

He sits on horseback. Behind him are hundreds of men, their faces lost in shadow. 

“You get a sense that there's hundreds of men in the painting, but you can't, can't see any of their features, if you know what I mean,” says Scuffil.  “And the sad thing about that is very few of them came back after that battle,” she says. 

Gleeson took on the project of the Grotto to recognize all those who were lost. He saw "the horrors of that terrible, terrible conflict”, she says.

“And it's because Ireland didn't get pulled into the Second World War. And so in many ways, that grotto is a peace monument,” Scuffil says.

The Grotto also contains a relic – what Fleming says is a piece of stone from the original Lourdes grotto, brought back by a woman named Kate McGee. “Her grandson was a very good friend of mine,” he says. 

Kate McGee was a big character, Fleming says. “She was a dealer, as a lot of the women were in their day. But she was a very formidable woman,” he says. 

“She was years ahead of her time in terms of women's rights and all that, and she wouldn't let any man dictate her, what they can do, what I can't do,” he says. 

“She lived her life the way she wanted to live it, with a great devotion to Our Lady,” Fleming says. “And she brought back a little bit of the statue of the statue wall from Lourdes.” 

Intangible heritage

In the back of his shop – which he says he’s retired from – recently, Fleming decides a good description of the grotto would be from a poem about it by local Anthony Freeman. 

He pulls out a copy and reads it aloud.

"We speak of mental health. We speak of safe space, of disconnecting from the city, from the noise and stress. We crave an oasis of tranquility where our minds can be calm and meditate,” he reads.

The neighborhood is deep, but they’ve also gone through a lot, says Fleming. The grotto has been a place to grieve the heroin epidemic, high rates of suicide, change, and many other things.  

“When you're in there, Meath Street could be packed with people,” he says. “Cars could be flying up and down. But as soon as you go into that space, it's peace and quiet.”

Local resident Kim Olin on the phone on 8 July, said, “The grotto is … it's just, it’s sacred, you know what I mean?” said. “Like an oasis in a busy city. You don't have to be religious. You just go in there and get some peace.”

For Fleming, having hotel visitors overhead, gaping down at the grotto, would take away from it. And for Olin too. 

"It's somewhere that we have to keep, and we don't want eight or nine storey hotel people looking down at it,” she says.

Harte, as he sat outside the grotto on that sunny Friday afternoon, said he hadn’t heard about the hotels planned for next to the grotto.

But he said if they have planning permission, “it’s probably too late anyway”, he says.

“Everywhere changes over the years,” he said. “You know, me, that's just, to go with the times.”

“As long as it’s been left like that,” he said, gesturing toward the grotto, “with nice flowers, benches … that’s good enough. Just to relax.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.