Last May, the Irish Aesthete looked at the sad fate of St Loman’s, Mullingar, a vast range of buildings dating from the 1850s and originally opened as a lunatic asylum (see Squandering National Resources « The Irish Aesthete). St Loman’s continued to offer long-term residential care for psychiatric patients until it was closed in December 2013. Since then, the state body responsible for the property, the Health Service Executive, has done nothing with it, allowing the place, which might be restored and used for a number of other purposes, not least housing, to fall into steadily worse condition. For the HSE, these circumstances are not unusual: the organisation owns some 200 buildings at least 110 of which have been categorised as ‘surplus to requirement.’ Deemed unfit for their original purpose, these properties have often been neither repurposed nor passed on to new owners. Instead the HSE appears to prefer that they sit vacant and deteriorating. At the end of last month, the Irish Independent reported that the health body had been presented by local authorities with a total bill of almost €800,000 in derelict site levies, some 50 per cent of which remained unpaid, with the largest bill linked to a former nurses’ building at University Hospital Galway where the organisation was being charged €245,000. It is worth pointing out that these buildings are the property of the Irish people, and supposedly in the care of the HSE. Too often that care is not forthcoming and instead one state body is expected to fine another, the money coming out of the same public purse, as funded by the taxpayer. Fortunately, there are exceptions to this sad and repetitive tale, as can be seen in Enniscorthy, County Wexford.

St Senan’s dates from a decade after St Loman’s but was intended to serve the same purpose: to act as Enniscorthy District Lunatic Asylum. Located on a site some 250 yards above the river Slaney and a prominent local landmark for more than a century and a half, the building was designed by architects James Bell and James Barry Farrell, and cost in the region of £40,000 to construct. Primarily faced in red brick produced on the site, with yellow brick used for the dressings, the hospital sits on a plinth of locally quarried granite. Opened in 1868, the building is an astonishing 650 feet (225 metres) long and follows an unusual asymmetrical plan centred on a thirteen-bay, three-storey central block with projecting five-bay wings on either side, much of the rest of the facade being broken up with a sequence of five-storey Italianate towers, most of them intended to store water. While the central block was used for administration, a chapel, dining hall and so forth, the long wings on either side provided accommodation for male and female inmates, of which there were originally supposed to be 232 of each sex, although this number would later rise: some 250 staff were employed on the site in different roles. St Senan’s remained in use until early in the present century. In 2010, it was one of three hospitals ordered by the Mental Health Commission to cease admissions, with the property described as ‘dilapidated, depressing and not fit for human habitation.’ By 2014, it was being used by the HSE for same-day respite care and administrative offices, but had been placed by An Taisce on the latter’s top 10 nationally significant buildings at risk. St Senan’s closed in 2015. 

In January 2017, less than two years after closing to patients, St Senan’s on a site of some 46 acres was offered for sale by the HSE with a guiding price of  just €780,000. The property was bought by a local development company, Bree Investments Ltd, which, working with GKMP Architects, is now in the midst of an imaginative and ambitious job of converting the former hospital into 60 large apartments. What this project shows is that it is possible for an old building to be given new purpose, one quite different from that originally envisaged but no less needed, especially today. If a commercial entity can undertake such a job on the basis that eventually profit will be realised, one must ask why the HSE, which is constantly short of funds (and consistently overreaching its annual budget) could not do likewise. Instead of sitting on assets which decline in value through want of maintenance, it should either engage in restoration and regeneration, or dispose of the property to a third-party which will do so. St Senan’s offers an alternative vision of what can happen to such historic properties.

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