Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Lay-offs at nuns' retreat centre

The Presentation Sisters are to make up to fifteen people redundant at their Mount St Anne’s Retreat and Conference Centre in Killenard, Co. Laois, while the centre is being expanded.

Director, Sr Roisin Gannon, said redundancies had been offered because the imminent commencement of building on site, which meant Mount St. Anne’s would not be offering full residential accommodation for retreats or other groups for approximately eighteen months.

“We will remain open for school retreats, planning groups, or any other day events that require only the use of the remaining limited facilities,” she explained.  “During this time of refurbishment we will not have the same volume of work we usually have.”

But Sr Gannon said the centre was not forcing staff to leave and “they have other options too.”

“Some staff are being offered the redundancy or lay-off, some positions will remain and some will be short-time - it’s their own choice whether they take it or not.”

The Presentation Sisters plan to build a three-storey atrium, conference room, dining room, fourteen bedrooms and a chapel at St Anne’s.

Staff at the Centre, some of them with up to twenty years’ service, were called individually to meetings with management to be told of the redundancies.

The centre runs a wide range of public and private retreats throughout the year as well as regular yoga, arts and crafts and pottery workshops.  

The nun announced the re-development of the Centre some months ago, saying the existing facilities were a constraint.

Mount St Anne’s was originally known as Mount Henry and was built in 1820 for Edward Randal Skeffington-Smyth, a substantial local landowner.  

The nuns, who purchased it in 1933, ran a regional novitiate there until 1973, when they transformed it into a liturgy studies centre - and later - a retreat centre.