‘The heat nearly blasted me out of it’

“I won’t shake your hand, my hands are not very clean,” said Sr Lily after hopping down from the farmyard Deutz Fahr tractor.

With her veil floating in the wind, Sr Lily strolls to the shed housing bales of miscanthus — an energy crop the nuns started growing in 2010. “We were told there was a great market for it, it would make money for farmers and there was a 50pc grant. But there was no market for it when we grew it. We didn’t even get the single farm payment on it for the two or three years.

“We were told it would grow on any land, that it didn’t need fertiliser but that’s absolute nonsense, it needs good ground to grow,” she says.

In 2014 as others gave up on the crop, Sr Lily realised it was profitable to grow for heating. “I kept onto it to explore the idea of heating the Abbey,” she says. Last October, a miscanthus boiler from Poland, worth €120,000, was installed at the Abbey, paid for through special fundraising events. “It’s a massive, old building. The first day it was lit the heat blasted me out of it. I’m near 37 years in Glencairn and I’ve never felt heat like it,” she says adding that the Abbey is making roughly a 50pc saving on their oil bill by using the miscanthus boiler.

Contractors were hired to harvest the miscanthus last Easter Friday. “I put three bales in every two days with the tractor and loader. 320 bales will heat the house for the year — we also need to use some wood to heat the water,” she says.

The crop will heat the Sisters’ new wing of 24 en-suite bedrooms. A new guest/retreat house is also in the pipeline. Meanwhile, they are fundraising to replace 120,000 broken slates on the roof of the old guesthouse. “I need 12,000 people to sponsor a slate at €10 each. People are very good, we’re very thankful for the €5,000 we received so far,” she says.