Raheny church – Church of Our Lady, Mother of Divine Grace – was designed by Peppard and Duffy architects and opened on Sunday, July 22, 1962.
Peppard and Duffy were well-respected architects, with offices on Merrion Square. Ronnie Tallon began his career under Louis Peppard and Hugo Duffy, in the late 1940s. Hugo Duffy, whose biography of James Gandon was published last year, credits the design of the practice’s work to his late partner.
He recently described Raheny church to me – dismissing it, wrongly, in my view – as “a great big dinosaur. John Charles McQuaid insisted on those churches for 2,000 [people]. They were impossible, huge big lumps of stuff. We had to stick things on the front of them to try and cod the people.”
He claims that the large church they were really pleased about, “the only one that’s successful”, is the Church of the Holy Spirit, Greenhills, which opened on Sunday, January 24, 1971. Its great copper roof is visible from much of south-west County Dublin.