Centre provides good value for money

SIR, — I write in response to an anonymous letter from Crossgar last week. For those who do not know, the Saint Patrick Centre houses four local charities and according to a recent survey provided £650,000 of direct and indirect support to local businesses and suppliers in our community last year.

The survey also revealed that the Saint Patrick Centre contributed over £1.5m to the local tourist economy in 2011 — which is good going considering we receive 0.8% of the rates in the District.

We operate at a fraction of the cost of any other visitor attraction in Northern and over 16 local jobs are housed at the Centre (we employ six) including many young people with learning difficulties who work in our Daisies Café. I can assure you for those people and their families the Saint Patrick Centre is not a waste of money.

The Saint Patrick Centre has also brought the Saint Patrick Signature Project to our District, which has helped attract hundreds of thousands of pounds to co-fund Downpatrick’s recent townscape improvements including the new Saint Patrick’s Square through the excellent efforts of our own local MP Margaret Ritchie and Down Council.

Without the Centre promoting Downpatrick and insisting that our local history and heritage is every bit as important as Titanic or the Giant’s Causeway (the other signature projects) the investment would have been spent somewhere else in Northern Ireland.

Tourism is worth £147m to Down District every year and the Centre is the key international tourist attraction here as well as being the centre of the town of Downpatrick. The Centre constantly promotes our area. We brought the President of Ireland to Down District last year, hope to do so again this March and will bring the leader of the Catholic church in America, Cardinal Timothy Dolan from New York, tipped by many to become the first American Pope, to Downpatrick in June.

This week the Centre is filming a sequence about Downpatrick for the New York Parade which will be seen by 20 million people in America on the March 17. This work needs to be continued and would be greatly enhanced (and much more noticeable) if only we had a hotel in the town capable of housing the many coaches we attract — this is what we urgently need.

Finally, in response to the claim that the Centre receives £150,000 a year from Down Council, this is simply not true. In fact our support from that source has ped by £28,000 this year alone and a local job has been lost as a result. 

Such reductions are unfortunately a sign of the times and although painful have not diminished our desire to continue to serve the local people, promote our unique heritage and proudly provide for all irrespective of faith, politic or ability. 

Yours etc,

DR. TIM CAMPBELL,

Director,

St. Patrick Centre.