World War II
During the Second World War there were a number of raids on Belfast by the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. On one occasion, during the infamous Belfast Blitz of Easter Tuesday, 15 April 1941, a bomb landed in front of the Church and, while it did not cause any structural damage to the Church, many of the windows were blown in. A second bomb landed at the nearby Gasworks. The explosion caused a huge vacuum in the local area which literally sucked out the remainder of the windows and the original Irish Oak frames were destroyed. Being a time of war, it was impossible to replace the oak window frames and so they were replaced in concrete, something that was to prove more damaging than the German bomb. The strength of the concrete has, over the last 60 years, destroyed the bricks surrounding these frames (the Church was built with handmade bricks) and by the time the Restoration work was complete upwards of 80,000 bricks needed to be replaced.
Read more about this topic: Saint Malachy's Church, Belfast
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
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