Mahon's Rainbow Club awaits lease approval on local building

Almost €16,000, allocated to Mahon’s Rainbow Club under the 2026 Local Enhancement Programme, will go towards works on the facility’s “forever home”, pending a lease approval at the Mahon Health Centre building.

The service, currently located at the Mahon Community Centre on Avenue De Rennes, was allocated a total of €15,900 under the scheme, which will go towards the replacement of windows and doors at their new facility.

CEO and co-founder of the Rainbow Club, Karen O’Mahony, told The Echo that while they have been on the hunt for a permanent unit for several years, they have since signed a lease for the Mahon Health Centre building on Lakeland Crescent, which is pending approval from Cork City Council.

“It’s taken a few years to get over the line, but we’re here,” said Ms O’Mahony.

“We should have very good news about keys soon.

“This will probably be one of the biggest allocations we’ve gotten [under a funding scheme], so we’re very excited.

“Once we have the keys, we can start looking at what needs to be done. It will cost about €480,000 to redo the whole building, because it’s an old ’80s building,” she added.

“We have applied for a loan from Community Finance for that amount and then hopefully we’ll be able to do all of the renovations that are needed.

“The plan then would be to move six of the services over, and that will reduce our modular outgoings and rent by at least half. So it’s going to make a significant difference to us.

“The funding under the Local Enhancement Programme will cover replacing all the windows and the new front door.

“We will need to raise €75,000 for the loan, because we need to have some money up front, and at the moment we have about €41,000.

“When we get the keys to the new building, we’re going to launch a big ‘new home’ campaign, and hopefully that will get us up to the €75,000.

“It’ll be a busy couple of months getting it all done, but it will be huge for us — we’ll be saving about €60,000 in rent per year just from reducing the modulars.

“Getting the new home will also open us up to other funding avenues which we haven’t been able to access and we will be able to scale our services — we’re hoping to scale respite, and some of the existing services too.

“It’s going to open up the world for our service users, and their families,” she said.“It’s like winning the lottery. We’re a very grassroots community organisation embedded in the local area, and we want to keep that going.

“It’s going to take a couple of years to move everything — our cafe will stay where it is — but it’s brilliant, it’s all about development, so we need to be able to sustain our growth and have the capacity to do that.”