Archbishop Martin looks to state for help with €20m cost of papal visit to Ireland

Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland for the World Meeting of Families in August 2018 is likely to cost more than €20 million (£17.7m), according to the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, who is the president of the event. He said that the high costs were due to security, technology and the health and safety requirements of hosting an event at a major site such as the Phoenix Park in Dublin.

Speaking on RTE Radio’s Sean O’Rourke programme, he explained that church collections are likely to bring in up to €5m but the rest will come from fundraising. In another Christmas interview, with the Sunday Business Post, Archbishop Martin said that while corporate sponsors may be brought in to help raise the money, they will not get much publicity out of it due to Pope Francis’ dislike of advertisements.

The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said the government will meet church representatives this year to discuss the papal visit. “The government will assist in any way to facilitate Pope Francis’ visit,” he said. “We just don’t know yet if it will be a short visit just for the Meeting of World Families or whether it will be an extended visit involving other things such as Northern Ireland.” The government is “very much at [the] disposal” of the Catholic Church, Mr Varadkar said, a possible indication that the state will bear a share of the security costs of the visit.

Archbishop Martin said he believed the state would look at the visit in the same way as with other distinguished visitors such as Queen Elizabeth and the then US president Barack Obama. At 81, Pope Francis’ age means his itinerary in Ireland will be more curtailed than his predecessor’s, Pope John Paul II, who was 61 when he visited in 1979. While Francis may go outside Dublin, Archbishop Martin has stressed that he is in Ireland for the World Meeting of Families in Dublin. Details of the visit will be confirmed in the next few months.

The gathering will include a three-day conference at the Royal Dublin Society, a Saturday evening event on 25 August possibly in Croke Park and a final public Mass on 26 August in the Phoenix Park.

Meanwhile, a poll conducted before Christmas by Worldwide Independent Network showed that Pope Francis is the most popular world leader among Irish people. He was viewed favourably by 70 per cent of Irish respondents and unfavourably by 21 per cent.