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Building a Catholic church in 1950s Ireland: architecture, rhetoric and landscape in Dromore, Co. Cork, 1952–6

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Richard J. Butler
Richard J. Butler*
Affiliation:
Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the intellectual culture of Catholic architectural production in 1950s Ireland through the study of a church-building project in rural West Cork. It analyses the phenomenon of the Irish ‘church-building priest’ in terms of their socio-economic background, fundraising abilities, and position within rural communities – in the context of significant rural emigration and economic stagnation. It also considers the role that the Irish countryside played in conditioning clerical understandings of architectural style and taste, and priests’ political readings of the rural landscape. Furthermore, it explores the phenomenon of Marianism in church design and ornamentation around the time of the international ‘Marian Year’ of 1954, and the political meanings of the rhetoric employed by clerics at church consecration ceremonies. The article concludes with reflections on social and economic aspects of Irish rural life and religious expression in a decade primarily understood as one of cultural insularity and conservative Catholicism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , October 2020 , pp. 223 - 249
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© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1 John A. O’Brien, The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World (London, 1954), p. 17.

2 R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1989), p. 535; Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea and Carmel Quinlan, eds, The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s (Cork, 2004).

3 Desmond J. Keenan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Sociological Study (Dublin, 1983), pp. 125–48; A. C. Smith, The South Ormsby Experiment: An Adventure in Friendship (London, 1960); Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2009); Denise Bonnette-Anderson, ‘The Culture and Consequences of Anglican Church Redundancy, 1945–1995: Leicestershire and Lincolnshire’ (PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2020). For the closures of Church of Ireland churches in these years, see Martin Maguire, ‘Churches and symbolic power in the Irish landscape’, Landscapes, 5:2 (2004), 91–113 (pp. 105–07).

4 Sarah Roddy, ‘The spoils of spiritual empire: emigrant contributions to nineteenth-century Irish Catholic Church building’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 5:2 (2012), 95–116; Patrick Doyle and Sarah Roddy, ‘Money, death, and agency in Catholic Ireland, 1850–1921’, Journal of Social History, first view online (November 2019).

5 Anon., ‘Our Lady’s year’, The Furrow, 4:11 (1953), 666–8; Robert A. Ventresca, Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII (Cambridge, MA, 2013), pp. 19, 39. For conjunctural history approaches, see Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ, 2004), p. 12; Shiv Visvanathan, ‘Anna Hazare and the battle against corruption’, Cultural Critique, 81 (spring 2012), 103–11.

6 John Henry Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923–1979 (1971, Dublin, 1980); Dermot Keogh, The Vatican, the Bishops and Irish Politics, 1919–39 (Cambridge, 2004); John Cooney, John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland (Dublin, 1999); James S. Donnelly Jr, ‘The Peak of Marianism in Ireland, 1930–1960’, in Stewart J. Brown and David W. Miller, eds, Piety and Power in Ireland, 1760–1960: Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin (Notre Dame, IN, 2000), pp. 252–83; James S. Donnelly Jr, ‘Opposing the “modern world”: the cult of the Virgin Mary in Ireland, 1965–85’, Éire-Ireland, 40:1–2 (spring/summer 2005), 183–245; Lindsay Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922–60 (Manchester, 2007); Lindsay Earner-Byrne, Letters of the Catholic Poor: Poverty in Independent Ireland, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, 2017); James S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘Bishop Michael Browne of Galway (1937–76) and the regulation of public morality’, New Hibernia Review, 17:1 (2013), 16–39; Daithí Ó Corráin, ‘Catholicism in Ireland, 1880–2015: Rise, Ascendancy and Retreat’, in Thomas Bartlett, ed., The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume IV: 1880 to the Present (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 726–64.

7 James Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame, 2007); Maria Luddy, ‘Unmarried mothers in Ireland, 1880–1973’, Women’s History Review, 20:1 (2011), 109–26; Maeve O’Rourke, ‘Ireland’s Magdalene laundries and the state’s duty to protect’, Hibernian Law Journal, 10 (2011), 200–37; Jacinta Prunty, The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums and Reformatory Schools of Our Lady of Charity in Ireland, 1853–1973 (Dublin, 2017); Sarah-Anne Buckley and Caroline McGregor, ‘Interrogating institutionalisation and child welfare: the Irish case, 1939–1991’, European Journal of Social Work, 22:6 (2019), 1062–72; Cara Delay and Annika Liger, ‘Bad mothers and dirty lousers: representing abortionists in postindependence Ireland’, Journal of Social History, first view online (August 2019).

8 Chris Eipper, The Ruling Trinity: A Community Study of Church, State and Business in Ireland (Aldershot, 1986).

9 Tom Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society (Dublin, 1987); Louise Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture (Dublin, 2002); Louise Fuller, ‘Catholicism in twentieth-century Ireland: from “an atmosphere steeped in the faith” to a la carte Catholicism’, Journal of Religion in Europe, 5:4 (2012), 484–513; Callum Browne, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (London, 2012); Gladys Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity (Oxford, 2016); Síle de Cléir, Popular Catholicism in 20th-Century Ireland: Locality, Identity and Culture (London, 2017); Bruce Bradley, ed., Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, on ‘The future of Irish Catholicism’, 106:421, special issue (spring 2017), 3–94.

10 Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so Poor for so Long? (Dublin, 2004); Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London, 2004), pp. 23–4, 465–70; Tom Garvin, News from a New Republic: Ireland in the 1950s (Dublin, 2010); Anne Chambers, T. K. Whitaker: Portrait of a Patriot (Dublin, 2014); Mary E. Daly, Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973 (Cambridge, 2016); Brian Girvin, ‘Stability, Crisis and Change in Post-War Ireland, 1945–1973’, in Bartlett, ed., The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume IV, pp. 381–406.

11 Dermot Keogh, ‘Introduction: The Vanishing Irish’, and Gerry O’Hanlon, ‘Population Change in the 1950s: A Statistical Review’, in Keogh, O’Shea and Quinlan, eds, The Lost Decade, pp. 11–20, 72–9; Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 578; Census of Population of Ireland, 1961: Volume 1: Population, Area and Valuation of each District Electoral Division and of each larger Unit of Area (Dublin, 1963).

12 John A. Murphy, ‘Lost decades?’ (review), The Irish Review, 33 (spring 2005), 134–6; Erika Hanna, Modern Dublin: Urban Change and the Irish Past, 1957–1973 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 55–6; Ellen Rowley, ‘Surrealist structures: the culture of architecture in 1940s and 1950s Ireland’, The Irish Review, 51 (2015), 47–66; Eleanor O’Leary, Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland (London, 2018); Richard J. Butler, ‘Catholic power and the Irish city: modernity, religion, and planning in Galway, 1944–49’, Journal of British Studies (forthcoming July 2020).

13 Richard Hurley and Wilfrid Cantwell, eds, Contemporary Irish Church Architecture (Dublin, 1985), pp. 35–68; Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950, pp. 111–16; Robert Proctor, Building the Modern Church: Roman Catholic Church Architecture in Britain, 1955 to 1975 (Farnham, 2014); de Cléir, Popular Catholicism in 20th-Century Ireland, pp. 2–15; Ellen Rowley, ‘Andrew Devane’s Dublin Churches: Catholic Architecture in Ireland in an Age of Tentative Radicalization, 1960–1975’, in Lisa Godson and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, eds, Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland and Beyond: Influence, Process and Afterlife since 1945 (London, 2019), pp. 62–86.

14 Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950, pp. xxv, 22, 91–2; Ellen Rowley, ‘Transitional Modernism: the Case of 1950s Church Architecture in Dublin’, in Edwina Keown and Carol Taffe, eds, Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics (London, 2009), pp. 195–216; Ellen Rowley, ‘Catholic Churches and Cathedrals in the Twentieth Century’, in Andrew Carpenter, et al., eds, Art and Architecture of Ireland: Volume IV: Architecture, 1600–2000 (Dublin, New Haven and London, 2014), pp. 295–9; Richard J. Butler, ‘All Saints, Drimoleague, and Catholic visual culture under Bishop Cornelius Lucey in Cork, 1952–9’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 120 (2015), 79–97; Antoin O’Callaghan, The Churches of Cork City: An Illustrated History (Dublin, 2016); Paula Murphy, ‘Art and Architecture in Ireland, 1880–2016’, in Bartlett, ed., The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume IV, pp. 765–808 (pp. 788–9).

15 Brian Fallon, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture, 1930–1960 (New York, 1998), p. 190. For a corrective, see Alan A. Gillis, ‘Not so innocent’ (review), The Irish Review, 26 (autumn 2000), 143–5. For similar views from the 1950s and 1960s, see Anon., ‘Church architecture symposium’, Irish Builder and Engineer, 97:10 (May 1955), 461–2 and Ian Nairn, ‘Ecclesiastical All-Sorts’, The Observer, 24th April 1966.

16 Thomas P. Kennedy, ‘Church Building’, in P. J. Corish, ed., A History of Irish Catholicism, Vol. 5: The Church since Emancipation (Dublin, 1970), pp. 1–36; Keenan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, pp. 125–48; Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic parish, the Catholic chapel, and village development in Ireland’, Irish Geography, 16 (1983), 1–15; David W. Miller, ‘Landscape and religious practice: a study of mass attendance in pre-famine Ireland’, Éire-Ireland, 40:1–2 (spring-summer, 2005), 90–106; Emmet Larkin, The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1750–1850 (Dublin and Washington, DC, 2006), pp. 137–88; Brendan Grimes, ‘Funding a Roman Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Ireland’, Architectural History, 52 (2009), 147–68; Cara Delay, ‘“The gates were shut”: Catholics, chapels, and power in late nineteenth-century Ireland’, New Hibernia Review, 14:1 (2010), 14–35; Cara Delay, ‘“Language which will move their hearts”: speaking power, performance, and the lay-clerical relationship in modern Catholic Ireland’, Journal of British Studies, 53:2 (2014), 426–52; Roddy, ‘The spoils of spiritual empire’; Doyle and Roddy, ‘Money, death, and agency in Catholic Ireland’; Stuart Henderson, ‘Religion and development in post-Famine Ireland’, The Economic History Review, 72:4 (2019), 1251–85.

17 Brian Conway, ‘Contexts of trends in the Catholic Church’s male workforce: Chile, Ireland, and Poland compared’, Social Science History, 40:3 (2016), 405–32 (pp. 417–19).

18 Paul Blanshard, The Irish and Catholic Power: An American Interpretation (London, 1954), pp. 41, 74–5, 192, 200; Michael Sheehy, Is Ireland Dying? Culture and the Church in Modern Ireland (London, 1968), pp. 184–98; Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, pp. 196–272; Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950, pp. xvii, 45–7, 75, 78–9, 138, 230.

19 Sheehy, Is Ireland Dying?, pp. 184–98; Ferriter, Transformation of Ireland, p. 12; Butler, ‘All Saints, Drimoleague, and Catholic visual culture under Bishop Cornelius Lucey’, pp. 80–5; Richard J. Butler, ‘All Saints, Drimoleague: clarifications and new discoveries’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 121 (2016), 141–3.

20 Cork Evening Echo, 30th May 1953; Anon., ‘The great ten years in Caheragh’, The Fold (June 1963), 27–30. The West Cork churches are Dromore, Drimoleague, and Caheragh; see Butler, ‘All Saints, Drimoleague, and Catholic visual culture under Bishop Cornelius Lucey’. For the city churches, see Frank Keohane, The Buildings of Ireland: Cork, City and County (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020); Richard J. Butler, Town Planning and the Catholic Church in Cork and Waterford cities, 1935–1965, in preparation.

21 James S. Donnelly Jr, The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (London, 1975), p. 2; Eipper, The Ruling Trinity; Peter Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford, 1998); David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork and Madison, WI, 2005); David Butler and Joseph Ruane, ‘Identity, difference and community in southern Irish Protestantism: the Protestants of West Cork’, National Identities, 11:1 (2009), 73–86.

22 Eipper, The Ruling Trinity, pp. 93–4.

23 Butler, ‘All Saints, Drimoleague, and Catholic visual culture under Bishop Cornelius Lucey’; Keohane, The Buildings of Ireland: Cork, p. 383.

24 Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (1924, Dublin, 1967), pp. 19–20; D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin, 1905), pp. 112–13. See also L. M. Cullen, ‘The hidden Ireland: re-assessment of a concept’, Studia Hibernica, 9 (1969), 7–47 (pp. 10–11); John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (Boston, 1987); Heather Laird, ‘Introduction: Daniel Corkery as Postcolonial Critic’, in Heather Laird, ed., Daniel Corkery’s Cultural Criticism (Cork, 2012), pp. 1–14.

25 Whyte, Church and State, pp. 24–119; Keogh, The Vatican, the Bishops and Irish Politics, pp. 123–220; R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 (London, 2014), pp. 289–326; Ó Corráin, ‘Catholicism in Ireland’, pp. 729–39.

26 General Registry Office (Ireland), birth registration no. 400 (19th December 1888), District no. 1 in the Union of Cork in the County of City of Cork, p. 83 <https://www.irishgenealogy.ie> [8th January 2020]; Southern Star, 7th November 1953; Cork and Ross Diocese biographical records, ‘Very Rev. Canon Patrick Henchy PP’, <http://corkandross.org/priests/very-rev-canon-patrick-henchy-pp-2> [8th January 2020].

27 1901 Census for house 2, Rathmore, North East Ward, Cork <http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie> [8th January 2020]; Guy’s City and County Almanac and Directory for 1945 [Cork], p. 221 <http://www.corkpastandpresent.ie> [8th January 2020]; Patrick Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, The Fold (July 1963), 15–18 (pp. 15–16).

28 Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, pp. 15–16; Southern Star, 19th April 1969. For ‘shopocracy’, see David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City (London, 2014), pp. 336–40.

29 Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, p. 16; Cork and Ross Diocese biographical records.

30 Southern Star, 7th November 1953; Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, p. 17.

31 Promotion to PP at such a senior age was not unusual in 1950s Ireland with such a large body of serving priests – see Conway, ‘Contexts of trends in the Catholic Church’s male workforce’, pp. 416–19.

32 John Hayes, ‘The Beginning’, Muintir na Tíre Official Handbook, 1941 (Dublin, 1941), pp. 43–50. See also Liam O’Dowd, ‘Town and country in Irish ideology’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 13:2 (1987), 43–53 (pp. 46–8); Mervyn Horgan, ‘Anti-urbanism as a way of life: disdain for Dublin in the nationalist imaginary’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 30:2 (autumn 2004), 38–47 (p. 38).

33 Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, p. 17.

34 Luigi Guinta, The Holy Year: History, Doctrine, Liturgy (Vatican City, 1950), pp. 117–21; Southern Star, 18th November 1950; Siobhán Holland, A History of Caheragh Parish (Bantry, n.d. [c. 2000]), p. 20; Donal J. O’Sullivan and Cammy Harley, The History of Caheragh Parish (Skibbereen, 2010), pp. 83–90, 179–80.

35 Paul M. Kerrigan, Castles and Fortifications in Ireland, 1485–1945 (Cork, 1995), pp. 150–247; Evan Wilson, ‘The naval defence of Ireland during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, Historical Research, 92:257 (August 2019), 568–84.

36 Freeman’s Journal, 2nd October 1843; Anon., ‘Ireland’, Western Literary Messenger (Buffalo, NY), 9:23 (8th January 1848), 366–7.

37 Alan Gailey and G. B. Adams, ‘The bonfire in North Irish tradition’, Folklore, 88:1 (1977), 3–38 (p. 7); Patricia O’Hare, ‘St. John’s Eve traditions in County Kerry, c. 1850–1950’, Béaloideas, 76 (2008), 23–88 pp. 27–8. See also de Cléir, Popular Catholicism in 20th-Century Ireland, pp. 78–85.

38 Patrick Henchy, ‘The cross on the hill’, The Fold (June 1954), 22–3. This melodramatic form of writing was very common at the time, and Henchy’s tone would not have stood out as overly romantic or emotive – see, for another example, Southern Star, 9th April 1955.

39 There are numerous scriptural references to the construction of temples as metaphors for Christ and the Christian community – see, for example, Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10, 1 Peter 2:5–7, 1 Corinthians 6:19, etc.; and the writings of St Francis of Assisi. See also Anon., ‘Laying the foundation stone’, The Fold, 2:2 (August 1954), 21–2; Theodor Klauser, ‘Directives for building a church’, The Furrow, 6:6 (June 1955), 372–80; and A. G. Martimort, The Church at Prayer: An Introduction to the Liturgy (New York, 1968), pp. 166–7. I am grateful to Fr Fintan Lyons and Dr Sarah Goldsmith for several of these references.

40 Ciaran O’Neill, ‘Bourgeois Ireland, or, on the Benefits of Keeping One’s Hands Clean’, in James Kelly, ed., The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume III, 1730–1880 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 517–41; Mary Hatfield, Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Cultural History of Middle-Class Childhood and Gender (Oxford, 2019), ch. 5.

41 Grimes, ‘Funding a Roman Catholic Church’; Delay, ‘“Language which will move their hearts”’, p. 426; Roddy, ‘The spoils of spiritual empire’; Doyle and Roddy, ‘Money, death, and agency in Catholic Ireland’; Sarah Roddy, Money and Irish Catholicism, 1850–1921, in preparation.

42 Brendán Mac Suibhne, The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford, 2017), pp. 182–3.

43 Connacht Tribune, 17th June 1939; Marty Gilmore and Mattie Kilroy, The History of Ahascragh & Caltra (Ballinasloe, 1993), pp. 146–7, 189; Richard J. Butler, ‘Notes on the art and architecture of East Galway in the vicinity of Ahascragh’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 70 (2018), 35–51 (p. 36).

44 For later building work, see for example, his involvement in the rebuilding of Crosshaven church in the 1960s – Patrick Henchy, ‘Extension to St. Brigid’s Parish Church, Crosshaven’, The Fold, 8:8 (February 1961), 33–4; Irish Builder and Engineer, 102 (July 1960), 551; Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, pp. 17–18.

45 Southern Star, 5th September 1953.

46 Southern Star, 12th December 1953.

47 David R. Stead, ‘Economic change in South-West Ireland, 1960–2009’, Rural History, 22:1 (2011), 115–46 (pp. 116–22).

48 Cork and Ross Diocesan Archive, Caheragh parish reports, 254/11C, Annual statement of parish accounts for Caheragh, 1953, 1954, 1956 and 1957.

49 Eoin O’Mahony, ‘Problems with drawing lines: theo-geographies of the Catholic Parish in Ireland’, Journal of the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions, 1:1 (2014), 48–65. Gortnascreeny (Cork Rural DED no. 309) contained fourteen townlands; Caheragh (Cork Rural DED no. 303) contained thirteen townlands. The boundaries of both these DEDs did not change during the period under scrutiny.

50 Cork and Ross Diocesan Archive, Caheragh parish reports, 254/11C, Diocese of Cork visitation queries, parish of Caheragh, 1953.

51 Southern Star, 9th June 1956.

52 Saorstát Éireann: Census of Population, 1926: Volume 1: Population, Area and Valuation of each District Electoral Division and of each larger Unit of Area (Dublin, 1928), pp. 81–91; Ireland: Census of Population, 1936: Volume 1: Population, Area and Valuation of each District Electoral Division and of each larger Unit of Area (Dublin, 1938), pp. 81–90; Census of Population of Ireland, 1946: Volume 1: Population, Area and Valuation of each District Electoral Division and of each larger Unit of Area (Dublin, 1949), pp. 81–90; Census of Population of Ireland, 1951: Volume 1: Population, Area and Valuation of each District Electoral Division and of each larger Unit of Area (Dublin, 1952), pp. 89–110; Census of Population of Ireland, 1956: Population, Area and Valuation of each District Electoral Division and of each larger Unit of Area (Dublin, 1957), pp. 86–95; Census of Population of Ireland, 1961: Volume 1: Population, Area and Valuation of each District Electoral Division and of each larger Unit of Area (Dublin, 1963), pp. 88–97; Census of Population of Ireland, 1966: Volume 1: Population of District Electoral Divisions, Towns and larger Units of Area (Dublin, 1967), pp. 109–15.

53 Central Statistics Office (Ireland), Consumer Price Index Base, 1922–2019 <www.cso.ie> [9th January 2020].

54 Southern Star, 30th January 1954.

55 Roddy, ‘The spoils of spiritual empire’.

56 Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, p. 17.

57 Southern Star, 15th September 1928; 21st September 1929; Keohane, The Buildings of Ireland: Cork, p. 541.

58 O’Sullivan and Harley, History of Caheragh Parish, pp. 83–93. David Dore served as PP of Caheragh between 1814 and his death in 1864; see Cork and Ross Diocese biographical records, ‘Very Rev. David Dore PP’ <http://corkandross.org/priests/very-rev-david-dore-pp-2> [13th January 2020]; and Pat Crowley, ‘Old Caheragh church’, West Cork History: History of Durrus/Muintervara blog, 31st January 2016 <https://durrushistory.com/2016/01/31> [13th January 2020].

59 Patrick Henchy, ‘Our new church at Dromore’, The Fold (April 1954), 25–6. There are no records of a Fr Begley serving in the parish c. 1900, but presumably Henchy is here referring to Michael Begley, CC of the parish between 1838 and 1847; see Cork and Ross Diocese biographical records, ‘Very Rev. Michael Begley PP’ <http://corkandross.org/priests/very-rev-michael-begley-pp> [13th January 2020]. The church is shown complete with nave and transepts in the 6” Ordnance Survey map for the area, surveyed in 1841 (sheet no. CK119).

60 O’Sullivan and Harley, History of Caheragh Parish, p. 87. See also Delay, ‘“Language which will move their hearts”’, p. 426.

61 Southern Star, 26th December 1953; 23rd April 1955.

62 Southern Star, 26th December 1953.

63 Butler, ‘All Saints, Drimoleague, and Catholic visual culture under Bishop Cornelius Lucey’, pp. 35–6.

64 Southern Star, 1st May 1954; 29th May 1954.

65 Southern Star, 17th July 1954; 5th March 1955; Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, p. 17.

66 Southern Star, 17th July 1954; 25th September 1954.

67 Southern Star, 12th February 1955; 19th March 1955; 30th April 1955.

68 Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, p. 17.

69 Ibid.

70 Southern Star, 14th May 1955; Cork and Ross Diocese biographical records, ‘Very Rev. Canon Edward J. Fitzgerald PP’ <http://corkandross.org/priests/very-rev-canon-edward-j-fitzgerald-pp-2> [14th January 2020].

71 Henchy, ‘Fifty years a priest’, pp. 17–18.

72 Henchy, ‘Extension to St. Brigid’s Parish Church, Crosshaven’, pp. 33–4.

73 Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford, 1994), p. 17; Maguire, ‘Churches and symbolic power’, pp. 92, 100–07.

74 Alistair Rowan, ‘The Irishness of Irish architecture’, Architectural History, 40 (1997), 1–23 (pp. 3–5, 21–2); Sean O’Reilly, ‘Birth of a nation’s symbol: the revival of Ireland’s Round Towers’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 15 (1999), 27–33; John Turpin, ‘Visual culture and Catholicism in the Irish Free State, 1922–1949’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 57:1 (January 2006), 55–77 (pp. 65–9).

75 Irish Builder and Engineer, 96:8 (April 1954), 364. See, for example, his church at Farranree in Cork city (one of Lucey’s ‘Rosary’ churches), built in 1957–9, or his Faber-Castell factory in Fermoy, Co. Cork, opened in 1966; Patrick M. Delany, ed., Architectural Survey, 1959 (Dublin, 1959), p. 8; Irish Independent, 6th September 1966; Keohane, The Buildings of Ireland: Cork, pp. 178, 282.

76 Some alterations to the structure and layout of the church were made in 1966 by J. R. Boyd Barrett; see elevation, plan, and section drawings dated December 1964 (Cork and Ross Diocesan Archives, Cork); correspondence with Mrs. Cecilia Wilcox and Fr Danny Pyburn, Dromore, Co. Cork, 25th September 2016.

77 M. J. O’Kelly, ‘The Honan Chapel’, The Furrow, 1:6 (July 1950), 290–6; Michael Morris [Lord Killanin] and Michael Duignan, The Shell Guide to Ireland (London, 1967), p. 188; Paul Larmour, ‘The Honan Chapel, Cork: a shrine to the Irish arts and crafts movement’, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, 5 (2002), 22–47; Fergus Ryan, ‘Iconography of the Honan Chapel: symphony of a single idea?’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 119C (2019), 283–305; Keohane, The Buildings of Ireland: Cork, pp. 209–11.

78 Killanin and Duignan, Shell Guide, pp. 415–16; Jeanne Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival, 1830–1930 (London, 1980), pp. 58–60.

79 The date 1843 is inscribed on the tower at Waterloo; Sheehy, Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past, pp. 62–3; Dictionary of Irish Architects <www.dia.ie> [27th January 2020]; Keohane, The Buildings of Ireland: Cork, pp. 265–6, 580–1.

80 Irish Independent, 27th July 1909; Irish Press, 8th March 1935; Irish Builder and Engineer, 94:11 (May 1952), 544; Dictionary of Irish Architects <www.dia.ie> [6th April 2020].

81 Irish Builder and Engineer, 97:10 (May 1955), 461–2. For a full account, see The Furrow, 6:6 (June 1955), 338–80 and many other articles in the same journal from the early 1950s.

82 Delay, ‘“Language which will move their hearts”’, p. 452.

83 John Windele, Historical and Descriptive Notices of the City of Cork and its Vicinity; Gougaun-Barra, Glengariff, and Killarney (Cork, 1839), p. 271. The folklore of the ‘Murdering Glen’ is also richly documented in the 1930s Schools’ Collection project; see Michael Keohane, Dromore, Co. Cork, National Folklore Collection, UCD, Schools’ Collection, pp. 15–17 <https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4921613/4885103> [27th January 2020].

84 Henchy, ‘Our new church at Dromore’, p. 25.

85 Ibid.

86 Southern Star, 30th April 1955. See also Patrick Henchy, ‘The new church of Mary Immaculate at Dromore’, The Fold (May 1955), 34.

87 Patrick Henchy, ‘Mass rocks’, The Fold (April 1955), 30–3. For a broader overview here, see Sarah Covington, ‘“The Odious Demon from Across the Sea”: Oliver Cromwell, Memory and the Dislocations of Ireland’, in Erika Kuijpers et al., eds, Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), pp. 149–64 (pp. 152–3).

88 See, for example, Southern Star, 9th April 1955 and Anon. [very likely Patrick Henchy], ‘Mass rocks at Caheragh’, The Fold (June 1963), 33–7; O’Sullivan and Harley, History of Caheragh Parish, pp. 81–2.

89 Henchy, ‘Mass rocks’, pp. 30–3.

90 Enda Delaney, ‘Anti-Communism in the mid-twentieth-century Ireland’, The English Historical Review, 126:521 (August 2011), 878–903.

91 Southern Star, 10th May 1952. See also Anon., ‘Catholics under communist rule’, The Fold, 2:3 (September 1954), 39; Cornelius Lucey, ‘Socialism condemned’, The Fold, 2:11 (May 1955), 30; Blanshard, The Irish and Catholic Power, pp. 55–61; and Sheehy, Is Ireland Dying?, pp. 184–98.

92 Connacht Sentinel, 4th January 1949; Gerard Madden, ‘Bishop Michael Browne of Galway and Anti-Communism’, Saothar, 39 (2014), 21–31.

93 Southern Star, 17th July 1954.

94 Delay and Liger, ‘Bad mothers and dirty lousers’, p. 8.

95 Donnelly, ‘The Peak of Marianism in Ireland’, pp. 252–83; Donnelly, ‘Opposing the “modern world”’, pp. 183–245; Eugene Hynes, The Virgin’s Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cork, 2009), pp. 91–128, 253–66.

96 See, for example, Southern Star, 13th March 1954; 18th September 1954; 20th November 1954. See also de Cléir, Popular Catholicism in 20th-Century Ireland, pp. 90–2; Finola Finlay and Robert Harris, ‘Wayside miracles’, Roaringwater Journal (26th July 2015) <https://roaringwaterjournal.com/tag/wayside-shrines-ireland> [28th January 2020]; Keohane, The Buildings of Ireland: Cork lists many such shrines and grottos.

97 Southern Star, 29th May 1954.

98 Southern Star, 7th May 1955. I am grateful to Finola Finlay, George Walsh and David Caron for assistance identifying the designer of this window.

99 Southern Star, 5th March 1955; 30th April 1955; Holland, History of Caheragh Parish, pp. 7–8.

100 Southern Star, 30th April 1955.

101 Delay, ‘“Language which will move their hearts”’; Niamh NicGhabhann, ‘“A development of practical Catholic emancipation”: laying the foundations for the Roman Catholic urban landscape, 1850–1900’, Urban History, 46:1 (February 2019), 44–61 (pp. 49–50). See also Richard J. Butler, ‘The afterlives of Galway Jail, “difficult” heritage, and the Maamtrasna murders: representations of an Irish urban space, 1882–2018’, Irish Historical Studies (forthcoming November 2020).

102 Southern Star, 9th April 1932; Tom Hayes, ed., Cork and Ross Church Directory 2008 (Cork, 2008).

103 Photographs of the consecration of Dromore church by Paddy O’Keeffe, Bantry, 4th May 1955 (copies displayed in Dromore church, Co. Cork).

104 Southern Star, 30th April 1955; 7th May 1955; Irish Independent, 5th May 1955.

105 Cork and Ross Diocese biographical records, ‘Mgr. Joseph Augustine Scannell PP VG’, <http://corkandross.org/priests/mgr-joseph-augustine-scannell-pp-vg> [29th January 2020].

106 Southern Star, 9th April 1932; Keohane, The Buildings of Ireland: Cork, p. 384.

107 Southern Star, 9th April 1932.

108 Southern Star, 7th May 1955.

109 Southern Star, 7th May 1955. For a broader study of Irish Catholicism and the ideology of empire, see Roddy, ‘The spoils of spiritual empire’.

110 For the other two new Catholic churches built in West Cork around the same time (Drimoleague and Caheragh), some fragments of the old buildings were saved.

111 Henchy, ‘Our new church at Dromore’, p. 25. This subject is discussed in some more detail in Butler, ‘Catholic power and the Irish city’.

112 O’Brien, The Vanishing Irish, p. 17.