SEPTEMBER 8 is a very special date for a tiny but tenacious Fermanagh community that has been given £403,000 of reasons to be cheerful this autumn.
For that is the day the extension to the existing highly successful Cashel Community Centre will be opened in a year when they also celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the opening of the Centre near the Leitrim border in 1993.
And that is the total coast of a major extension to the centre.
For chairman Anthony McGrath and Louise Leonard Secretary of the Community Association and all the other hard working members, it will be a truly special day as Louise told the Herald.
“It’s at the final stage of its works and the new build is completed and the car park was Phase Two which will be completed on the third week of August.
“The official opening is on September 8 at 1pm sharp and the centre will be paid for when it opens”, she said. “We still have the Main Hall but there is an extension to our kitchen, a foyer into a new room that can facilitate various groups and it can facilitate between 40 and people in. This was badly needed because there are not enough days in the week for functions in Cashel.
“Previously we could only run one function per night in the hall and we were losing out, so now we can go back to back and run two functions at the same time.
“And we can have cookery classes in the kitchen so we can actually have three functions on at the same time.
“We also have a health clinic as part of the extension where we will have a nurse for flu injections chiropody and we will have an optician and all of that came about form the survey we had to do for “Space and Place” our main funder”
It took the determined Cashel community three applications before they were finally accepted for grant approval for the project that is a clear testament to their tenacity.
Meanwhile chairman of the Association Anthony McGrath, who was a member of the original committee back in the mid 1970s, said, “It’s a great day for Cashel and something that we have been looking forward to for a long time and eventually it is coming to pass.
“This is not just about our own generation, but hopefully it will be used by generations to come. And we are expecting that already.
“It is great for our community and we have a long tradition of cross community and cross-border co-operation here.
“It has always been something that has been natural here for generations we did not have to work on it,” Anthony added.
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