Ireland

St Vincent’s Church in Sunday’s Well, Cork, a 170-year-old protected Gothic church on 0.58 acres, is back on the market at €375,000, half its 2018 price, after University College Cork pulled out of a deal.

St Vincent’s Church in Sunday’s Well, Cork, a 170-year-old protected Gothic church on 0.58 acres, is back on the market at €375,000, half its 2018 price, after University College Cork pulled out of a deal.

The Religious Sisters of Charity are seeking €40 million for St Mary’s Campus in Dublin 4, a 13.47-acre site founded in 1868 as a home for the blind, with a masterplan for about 360 apartments, care beds and a hotel.

Dublin’s Catholic Archdiocese took in €31 million and spent €34.2 million in 2024, and its reserves could run out by 2041 as priest numbers and Mass attendance fall, according to its financial statements.

Dublin’s Christ Church Leeson Park, judged too large for its Church of Ireland parish, has been sold to the Romanian Orthodox Church, which raised the money with help from Romania’s Department for Romanians Abroad, donors and its community.

St Luke’s, an 1863 Gothic Revival church on Belfast’s Northumberland Street sold by the Church of Ireland 12 years earlier, was listed at £185,000, with the agent suggesting youth, leisure, commercial or residential uses.

Ireland’s High Court has rejected most of a residents’ challenge to 232 homes on former Carmelite convent lands in Delgany, Co Wicklow, which the nuns sold for €15 million in 2019, while keeping construction frozen pending a wildlife issue.

A former Church of Ireland church in Glengarriff, west Cork, dating from 1860 and converted into a three-bedroom home overlooking the harbour, was listed at €895,000 amid a run of high-value sales in the village.

The Sisters of St Clare, in Kenmare since 1861, sold their last convent in the town, a building on five acres, to Kerry County Council for community use at a price reported to be well below market value.

Dublin City Council planned a land-buying programme targeting church and institutional sites, warning that the land needed to keep building its 15,000-plus social, affordable and cost-rental homes would run out after 2026.

The Sisters of Mercy listed their five-bedroom Convent of Mercy in Schull, West Cork, on 1.6 acres with harbour views, at €750,000, ending a presence in the village that began with a primary school in 1904.

More than 100 social homes for older people, a smaller 300-seat church and a primary care centre have been approved on the site of Finglas’s 3,500-seat Church of the Annunciation, part of a national public-private scheme.

Catholic orders and dioceses in Ireland have sold more than €1 billion of land since 1999, including a €95 million Dublin seminary site, and new zoning requests suggest far more church land could soon be developed.

After Tonga’s 2022 eruption and tsunami damaged church buildings, schools and hospitals, the Free Wesleyan Church launched a three-stage plan to respond, reconnect and rebuild, backed by partners including Irish Methodists.

Dublin’s Catholic archdiocese asked the city council to rezone 33 church sites and several schools so homes could be built on them in future, arguing many sit in disadvantaged areas where housing need should take priority.