1861 – St Saviour’s Church, Dominick Street, Dublin

St Saviour’s Church is perhaps the finest church by J.J. McCarthy in Dublin even though it was never completed as planned. In the early 1850s, four houses and a large yard, once a coach factory, in Lower Dominick Street were purchased by the Dominican order. One of the houses had been the residence of Sir Christopher Dominick, from whom, and not from St. Dominic, the street got its name. The cornerstone was blessed by the Most Reverend Dr. Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin, on 8 September, 1852. The original estimate was for £15,000, an enormous sum at that time. A proposed tower and spire was never started, the money being used instead to build the adjoining monastery designed by John Loftus Robinson in 1885. There is a fine interior, though now lacking many of its original features due to re-organisation after the second Vatican Council. A fine nave with aisles and side chapels leads to a polygonal apse.

Described at its opening as: “When entering, the visitor beholds the sanctuary with its golden semi-dome and stained glass Gothic windows shedding a mellow and religious light on the almost lace-work tracery in stone of the tabernacle and high altar. So light, so graceful is the general character of the clustered pillars, that no one dreams of their collossal proportions; and then the numerous side-chapels, each a shrine, wherein is to be seen some exquisite triumph of art … Through the open arch of the great central portal a view could be caught from without of the sanctuary with its emblazoned windows, and the splen did high altar blazing with lights forming the termination to the vista of clustered columns sustaining the richly decorated ceiling.”
The Freeman’s Journal, 15th January, 1861