The building
St Paul’s was Patrick Byrne’s first church, and he gave it something Catholic Dublin had rarely dared put on a chapel: a four-faced public clock. In the 1830s a clock was more or less a Protestant feature, shorthand for civic standing and public responsibility. Byrne set one into the three-stage Italianate bell tower, capped the tower with a copper dome finished in 1843, and fronted the whole thing with a pedimented tetrastyle Ionic portico in granite that still pulls your eye off the quay. Three statues crown the pediment, St Paul at the apex with St Peter and St Patrick either side, carved around 1870 by Joseph Robinson Kirk.
The church went up between 1835 and 1844, in the years after Catholic Emancipation, when the Church was putting up visible, high-status buildings for the first time in generations. That context is the whole point of it. This is a parish chapel wearing the clothes of a civic monument.
Inside, on the rare occasions you can get inside, the nave runs under a shallow barrel-vaulted ceiling of five coffered bays, over a mosaic floor, to a marble altar. Behind the altar hangs F. S. Barff’s copy of Rubens’ Conversion of St Paul, painted around 1863.
The bells, and two weddings
In 1843 a peal of eight bells, cast by James Sheridan at the Eagle Foundry on nearby Church Street, rang out for the first time. They were hung for change ringing and converted to a single-person chime in 1950.
Two of the marriages held here are worth knowing. Captain Charles Boycott, the Mayo land agent whose name became a verb, married Annie Dunne at St Paul’s in 1852. And in 1910 Éamon de Valera married Sinéad Flanagan, a decade before either was a household name.
Can you actually get in?
Here is the honest part: probably not, at least not on a whim. St Paul’s stopped being a parish church in 1999. It now houses the Dublin Diocesan Ministry and Mission Office and shares its nave with the St Gregorios Jacobite Syrian Christian Church, Catholic youth ministries, and Latin Mass and Taizé prayer gatherings. There are no fixed public opening hours. If you want to see the interior, time your visit to a service or event, or arrange it in advance with the Mission Office. A side entrance is the step-free way in; the upper galleries are not.
So for most people passing, St Paul’s is a façade, and it is a good enough one to earn the two minutes it takes to cross the road and look up. The portico reads best in low sun, when the granite and the copper dome pick up the light coming off the water.
Nearby
St Paul’s sits on Arran Quay facing the River Liffey, in the older part of the north city. Five minutes east along the quays brings you to Gandon’s Four Courts and, a little further, his Custom House. Temple Bar, with its galleries and music, is a short walk across the river, and Smithfield and the markets lie a few minutes west. Street parking on the quays is limited, and the church is an easy walk from Connolly and Tara Street stations, so come in on foot or by rail if you can.
