- A Roof to Save, A Night to Remember – Major New Fundraiser To Be Unveiled Soon.
- Something Big Is Coming: Major New Fundraiser for Cathedral of the Assumption, Thurles – Set for Early May.
Almost every family in the Thurles area has at least one thread that leads back to Thurles Cathedral.
It might be the memory of a baptism carried in a shawl and whispered prayers. It might be First Communion photographs taken on the steps, Confirmation day nerves, or the steady comfort of familiar hymns sung from the choir. For others, it is the bright lift of a wedding morning and, sooner or later for us all, the quiet dignity of farewells; funerals, anniversaries, candles lit for names we still speak.
Thurles Cathedral isn’t just a landmark you pass on the way through Thurles town; no it is a place where lives are marked, where time is measured in sacred moments, and where the community’s joys and sorrows have been gathered and held for generations.
And then there’s the detail that catches you almost immediately as you approach from the street. To the right, slightly apart, like a gentle prologue before the main story, stands a circular building, modest in scale yet rich in meaning.
That round building is the baptistery; its separation from Thurles Cathedral is no accident, and it is one of the things that makes Thurles so quietly distinctive.
In Ireland, baptisteries are typically absorbed into the body of the church. Here in Thurles, it stands free, echoing the great continental tradition, where baptism, the beginning of the Christian journey, was given its own threshold-space; a place of welcome, entry, and promise, before you pass into the larger embrace of the Cathedral itself.
Built in locally quarried limestone, the baptistery shares the Cathedral’s grounded, elemental strength; stone that feels native to its own landscape. Yet it totally refuses that tiresome, boring, and tedious lack of variety that results so often in dull routine. String courses and carved details break the grey with crisp definition, and in places lighter stone is introduced to lift the eye and relieve the broad limestone planes.
Then comes the architecture’s music; the repetition of arches. Below, a long, slender rhythm of limestone, pillars support lower arcade. Above, the upper arcade rests on a colonnade of stunted pillars in polished red Aberdeen granite, a sudden richness, a warmth of colour that feels almost like a flourish, as if the building has discovered ornament and decided to rejoice in it. Higher still, an upper wall, smaller in circumference than the lower, becomes more intricate, same richly decorated and pierced by twelve circular openings that read like little moons of daylight.
And naturally, the gaze rises again, to the dome, a crowning that seems to gather the whole circular form into a single upward gesture. At its summit sits the archiepiscopal cross with two arms, the sign that this Cathedral belongs to an archbishopric; not only a parish church, but a mother church with a wider symbolic reach.
All of which brings us to the urgent present.
Beauty like this depends on something deeply unromantic but absolutely essential, a sound roof. And right now, Thurles is seeking to re-roof the building and a major conservation step and fundraising is underway to make that possible. It is the sort of work that doesn’t make headlines the way a new project might, yet it is the work that decides whether what we love will endure; keeping out water, preventing slow damage, protecting artistry and memory alike.
In a way, it is fitting that the baptistery greets you first. A baptistery is about beginnings. And this moment is another beginning, too; the community’s chance to put its shoulder under the task, to protect what has protected so many of our milestones, and to ensure that the Cathedral remains not just admired, but kept.
A Gentle Call To Action.
If this place has ever held even one moment of your life; a prayer, a photograph, a hymn, a vow, a farewell, consider doing one small thing to help it hold those moments for the next family, and indeed the next.
A donation, a fundraiser, a share with someone who has moved away, but still carries Thurles in their heart, it all matters. Roofs are saved the way communities are built: not by one grand gesture, but by many hands doing what they can, when they can.
A major new fundraising event to support the re-roofing of the Cathedral of the Assumption, Thurles will be unveiled soon, with an early May 2026 date now in the diary.
Watch this space and be ready to help keep a roof over the place that has held so many of our life’s moments. Because some buildings are more than stone. They are memory made visible, and now, quite literally, the future of this one is “In Our Hands“.
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