Pat McGurn, Chief Executive Lakeland Community Care, Belcoo pictured with staff members Leanne Crozier, Majella Maguire Anne Marie Owens and Amanda ward outside the new building which will house them when completed
A NEW £1.2m centre in Belcoo is to offer a lease of life for older people in the west of the county as the building nears completion.
Planning for the new centre, that will house Lakeland Community Care Ltd, has been ongoing for the last number of years, and once the plans were finalised, work began in March 2012.
Lakeland Community Care is a non-profit organisation that works with elderly people in Fermanagh.
It’s an established charity and limited company overseen by a board of directors that covers areas including Belcoo, Garrison, Derrygonnelly, Newtownbutler and Teemore.
In operation since 1994, the Enterprise Centre in Belcoo has housed the company for most of its existence, as chief executive Pat McGurn explained this week.
“We provide domiciliary care, flexi-care, day care and social engagement projects. We also work across the local communities.”
“We started doing other things like befriending, IT, and things like that and we found we didn’t have the room – we had to hire all the rooms out.”
The charity has built up its own reserves and had been looking for a site for a building that would provide the space they need for a number of years.
“It’s very hard to get a green field site. It had to be in the village because it’s very hard to get planning permission. And you want people to get to it easily,” Pat explained.
The site is almost directly across the road for their current base at the Enterprise Centre, and work is hoped to be finished by summertime.
“The upper part is an office and meeting room.
“Downstairs is open plan which means that we can close it off and offer different programmes: a museum, library, an IT suite.
“It’s set up so that you can close up one part. We’re also hoping to have a kitchen and a garden.”
The building is costing £1.2m, with £250, 000 coming as part of funding through SWARD (South West Action for Rural Development) funding.
“There aren’t a lot of services or older people, and we want to provide something that makes people come out,” Pat went on.
“We would find with the rural communities, there’s a perception of Enniskillen: There’s traffic, it’s busy, people are on top of each other.
“But people locally here have their own wee community centre – where people support their own.”
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