Youngest team of priests in Ireland
August 1997
They’re young, they’re cool, and they’re with it. They’re the priests of Wexford parish.
From this week onwards, Wexford Presbytery will officially become the youngest priests’ house in Ireland, if not the world.
A total of seven priests will be living side by side in the School Street Presbytery, with the eldest of them being Fr Jim Fegan, who is a youthful 35 years old.
Fr Jim himself has just been promoted to the job of Wexford Parish Administrator, and becomes the youngest man ever to hold down the position.
He’s looking forward to it. With six good, young men around him, he reckons that the can really make today’s church relative to all ages. He has the youth, energy, and enthusiasm to do just that.
Having a group of young priests around him is a good thing, he believes, if only to make religion seem more relevant to young people.
‘It is a different approach to have such a young group of priests. We are the youngest presbytery in the country, if not the world. Of the seven of us, I’m the eldest at 35, and five of the seven are still under 30,’ he said.
These five include Fr Thomas Dalton, Fr Pat Mernagh (who is moving from Bride Street to Rowe Street), Fr Ken Quinn, Fr Aodhán Marken (who comes to Bride Street from St. Peter’s College) and Fr Billy Flynn, who is currently the chaplain at Wexford General Hospital.
The new RCA for Bride Street, Fr Sean Devereux, completes the line-up and he is not much older than those five, as he is just 32 years old.
Fr Fegan says the Diocese of Ferns is lucky as it has quite a few younger priests right now. ‘As a diocese, we have a lot of young priests and we still have priests out on loan. We are a blessed diocese to have so many young vocations,’ he said.
Fr Fegan himself has been in the Wexford parish for nearly a decade now, having originally hailed from East Wall in Dublin. He loves Wexford, and has enjoyed his time in Bride Street immensely.
However, while he duties will be mainly in Rowe Street now, he will not be forgetting the sister church.
‘As administrator, I oversee what goes on in the entire parish and I’ ll still have conversations with Bride Street and I’ll still be swapping back and forth.
‘I didn’t say goodbye to the people in Bride Street, just cheerio for now!’ he said.
Fr Jim intends easing himself into the role new role as Administrator. ‘There is a new team of people coming on, and I have to get to know the people of Rowe Street,’ he said.
He added that he will strive to build up a good working relationship with the other priests he is living with.
‘My job is to motivate the others and to create with them a working and living environment wehre poeople are happy with what they are doing. If that happens, it will filter out to the broader community,’ he said.