‘South Pres’ and the legacy of Nano Nagle

In 1771, Nano Nagle invited the Ursuline Sisters in Paris to Cork to help run her schools in the city. She could never have imagined that as a consequence there would one day be an entity known as the South Presentation Company Ltd ready to spend €10 million on redeveloping the earliest of her schools as a major educational and heritage complex over four acres of city-centre land.

The site consists of a convent, school buildings, offices, a cemetery, a garden and a fine chapel designed in 1865 by the English architect George Goldie.

Because "South Pres", as it was known in Cork, is also the mother-house of a congregation of Presentation nuns working in Australia, India and the US, the trustees for this scheme represent three Presentation groupings: the Irish Union, the American Conference and the Australian Society. The landlord of the site is the Irish Southern Province; the South Presentation Company is the newly-formed enabling company, with Michael O'Sullivan as chief executive and a 10-member board which includes three Presentation sisters.

It's true that few Presentation nuns are now teaching in Ireland, their schools having been handed over to boards of management. As Michael O'Sullivan explains it, however, the order had always kept a sense of ownership of its first location in Douglas Street.

“Since their foundation here the sisters went on a great journey and the story we are going to tell in this restoration is not only that of Nano Nagle and the city and the era in which she lived but of what you could call the diaspora, the dispersal by which these women went so far away from Ireland, their societal impact and the legacy they left in so many different countries.”

Mission statement
We are sitting in what was formerly the recreation room of this Presentation Convent, which closed its secondary school in 1997 and its national school in 2006. The windows look over the narrow route of Douglas Street where a sign on a corner wall opposite reads "Cove Lane". It was close to Cove Lane that the first of Nano Nagle's officially prohibited schools was opened in 1754. This little establishment, dedicated to the children of the poor and in open defiance of the Penal Laws, was so successful that six more schools were set up throughout the very needy city.

That very success was to cause the somewhat complicated subsequent history of this series of buildings, spread as they are between Evergreen (once Maypole) Street on the south and Douglas Street on the north.

The Ursulines settled on a larger site at Cove Lane donated by Nano's brother and by 1790 had built three interlinked houses in a group which comprises what Jessie Clarke of Jack Coughlan Architects describes as "a fascinating and in many ways highly intact record of religious life over a period of more than 200 years."

As an enclosed order the Ursulines could not adhere to Nano’s philanthropic outreach and concentrated instead on a boarding school for the daughters of the rising middle classes.

Having outgrown the Douglas Street premises they moved to the elite suburb of Blackrock in 1824 where, coincidentally, their fine house was originally owned by Nano Nagle’s generous uncle Joseph. This mansion of “Pleasant Fields”, with its delightful chapel, is now closed and empty, although it remains as the graceful centrepiece of a large housing scheme called “Eden”. It has been replaced by a modern secondary school within the Ursuline Convent’s local educational complex.

Undaunted by the departure of the Ursulines, Nano Nagle's colleagues re- grouped as the congregation known as the Presentation Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This order reclaimed the Douglas Street premises and has remained there since, expanding the buildings and improving the gardens, which now include Nano's shrine-like tomb.

Nano Nagle ethos
With the growth of the suburbs the city-centre schools declined but the congregation identified other social uses and the site currently hosts a variety of services, from a migrant centre to Al-Anon. The project now submitted for planning permission is charged with preserving the ethos of Nano Nagle and her foundation. The mission statement envisages "a place where the life and legacy of a significant Cork woman is remembered and honoured, and where that legacy lives on in a vibrant centre of local community activity".

Style and ministry rarely accommodate each other very well but here, especially in the east-facing main convent block flanking the garden lawns and bounded by the long-walled stretch of the Novice’s Walk, it’s easy to see the historical appeal of the entire site.The plans impose a coherent sequence through the buildings, corridors and service areas with archive, ministry, and educational activities congregating at the core heritage hub.

Later plans will involve the most recent school structures at the western end of the site which while historically of least value will be integrated as a potentially sustainable income source for the development.

The radical approach needed to meet modern standards of universal access ensures, as architect Jack Coughlan says, that “The experience for visitors and residents will unfold as a compelling narrative through the site.”

The route will lead from entrance to atrium, from the vegetable garden whose produce is to be used in the café to the re-cast tomb of the foundress, from former classrooms (and well do I remember them!) to the original cells on the upper floors with the hinged openings on each door.

“We don’t intend a museum type arrangement here,” says Michael O’Sullivan. “Our focus will be on 18th-century Cork and the intention is to keep it vital, forward-looking and inspirational, so that we can channel information and challenge perceptions as those founding sisters inspired and challenged the status quo of their day.”