By Ryan Sands
PERMISSION for carrying out emergency stabilisation works on Downpatrick’s fire-damaged Convent of Our Lady of Mercy is being sought.
A planning proposal seeking consent to make the St Patrick’s Avenue listed building safe was recently lodged with the council by Stream Street Limited.
A design and access statement says that the submission is ‘an urgent application for listed building consent to authorise immediate emergency health and safety stabilisation works’.
‘On the night of Sunday 28 June 2026, the Grade B1 listed former Convent of Our Lady of Mercy was subjected to an intense, catastrophic fire,’ it reads.
‘The fire required a major intervention by the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service, which initially fought the blaze from the south to protect the adjacent St Patrick’s Church.
‘The building sustained extreme thermal damage, resulting in the total loss of internal timber floors and the entire roof structure.
‘This has left extensive areas of unrestrained, multi-storey external masonry walling completely unstable.’
It is stated that the proposed measures ‘represent the absolute minimum intervention necessary to mitigate an immediate and severe threat to life, public safety and neighbouring occupied properties, while attempting to retain as much structural heritage fabric as safely possible’.
The document also notes that site inspections were carried out by a chartered structural engineer on 29 June and 2 July, during which ‘severe defects were identified across the structural envelope’.
‘The perimeter walls vary in composition, predominantly consisting of a red-brick external skin with many walls appearing to be stone-faced internally,’ it continues.
‘The extreme intensity of the fire is highly likely to have degraded and destabilised the structural integrity of the mortar matrix binding these walls.
‘An extensive crack has been observed on the only rendered elevation located in close proximity to the parochial house.
‘If this crack propagates through the full depth of the wall, an immediate, unannounced partial collapse is highly probable.
‘A very slender chimney stack situated on the elevation directly facing the parochial house is structurally distressed and actively leaning inward toward the site, posing a localised collapse hazard.
‘Two substantial internal chimney stacks remain standing entirely freestanding.
‘Both exhibit top-heavy corbelling and are completely unrestrained due to the loss of the roof structure.
‘They are exceptionally slender and at imminent risk of failure.’
Decorative stone/brick gablets on the building’s elevations are also described as ‘structurally precarious’ and ‘highly unstable’, and some have ‘already suffered partial collapse’.
The statement points out that ‘a comprehensive, hands-on structural engineering appraisal and stone-by-stone conservation assessment would normally be presented’ for such an application.
‘However, physical access inside or immediately adjacent to the building envelope is currently impossible for health and safety reasons,’ it adds.
