Saint Patrick Mayobridge

History

St Patrick's stands on the site of a former Mass rock and replaced an earlier church, or rather a small Mass house. That original church was erected in 1806 to a T-shaped design, built of rough undressed stone at a reported cost of £1,000, and was the first Catholic church built in the parish of Clonallon since the Reformation. It was the work of Fr Bernard Polin, a native of Castle Street in Newry. The parish records that the parochial hall which replaced the old hall is believed to stand on the site of that first church.

Building work on the present church began in 1859, the year Fr Hugh Mooney was appointed resident curate in Mayobridge. The foundation stone was blessed by Dr Leahy, coadjutor of the diocese, on 15 August 1859, and the same prelate officiated at the dedication on 12 October 1862, when the Bishop of Kerry, Dr David Moriarty, preached and the congregation subscribed over £500. The church was erected by Fr John Brennan, a native of Kildare who as administrator in Warrenpoint raised the money to build it; he died in Dublin on 17 December 1868 at the age of 50 and was interred in Burren cemetery. A parochial house was built opposite the church and completed in 1885.

Mayobridge, formerly part of the parish of Clonallon, became a parish in its own right on 26 January 1984 under the title of St Patrick's, Clonallon, with Fr Thomas McConville as its first parish priest.

The building

The church is in the Gothic style and was designed by the Dublin architect James Joseph McCarthy. It covers 6,200 square feet and accommodates 1,400 persons. The clerk of works was John Murray of Dundalk, the construction was undertaken by the Armagh contractor McGaughy, and the building is reported to have cost in the region of £3,000. The hand-cut Newry granite is one aspect of the craftsmanship. The parish describes it as the largest country church in the diocese.

Following a fire in 2003 a brown block wall built at the rear of the sanctuary in the late 1960s or early 1970s was removed, revealing mouldings that had been hidden for more than 30 years. The altar rails of the 1970s were taken out, the sanctuary was raised and a new altar built, using as its frontispiece the centre of a side altar that had held Our Lady's statue. A marble lectern and celebrant's chair were added, and a modern baptismal font was replaced with an older sandstone font that had lain unused in a side porch.

Notable features

The church bell, which stands in its own structure, was made at the Sheridan Eagle foundry in Dublin in 1866 and replaced a small bell on top of the church that had fallen during a storm. Our Lady's altar was carved in Italy and was the first altar in the convent when it was built in 1924. The church has late nineteenth-century Gothic Revival and twentieth-century figurative stained glass, and two windows dedicated to St Francis and St Clare. A side altar in the church is said to have come from St Mary's Church, Burren, where it stood at the beginning of the 1900s, arriving in Mayobridge in the 1920s or 1930s.