The Cathedral of the Most Holy Trinity in Barrowstrand Street in Waterford was the first Catholic cathedral built in Ireland since the Reformation. Dating from 1793, its location is no accident. The south-east of Ireland, roughly everything east of a line drawn from Cork to Dublin, was the area where the Catholic interest survived best through the penal era that followed the Williamite victory of 1691.
Many Catholic families, dispossessed of their lands by Cromwell and his successors, went into trade and enriched themselves. This Catholic merchant class maintained its solidarity through inter-marriage and social reticence, not threatening the new established order. Sons were discreetly educated in Catholic schools abroad.
The Catholic church was strongest where the community was strongest. In the impoverished west of Ireland, it still remained a pre-modern peasant body. But in the south-east, in the rich river valleys and towns where the Old English Catholic middle class had survived the bad days in good order, church and community were strong. The simplest way to illustrate this is to look at the foundation dates of Catholic institutions. Apart from the cathedral in Waterford, to which we shall return, there was the opening of what is now Carlow College (also 1793), the first post-penal era institution of higher learning for Catholics in the country. The adjacent cathedral was begun in 1828, as was the parish church in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. In nearby Youghal, Co. Cork, the parish church was built in 1798 in mock-Anglican style. In Cashel, Co. Tipperary, the church of St John the Baptist dates from 1790. Clongowes Wood College, the first Jesuit school in Ireland since the Reformation, opened in Co. Kildare in 1814. These are all very early foundation dates: most of the institutional revival of Catholicism in the rest of the island — especially in church-building — came in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Catholic elite of the south-east were a generation or two ahead of the rest of their co-religionists in terms of their social cohesion, wealth and influence. It is no coincidence that so many leading figures in the nineteenth-century hierarchy came disproportionately from this region. Paul Cullen, the first ever Irish cardinal, who dominated the Irish church in the generation after the Famine, was from Ballitore, Co. Kildare. His nephew, Patrick Francis Moran, was cardinal archbishop of Sydney and a key figure in the Irish Catholic diaspora of the late nineteenth century. Cullen’s predecessor as archbishop of Dublin, Daniel Murray, was born near Arklow, Co. Wicklow. John Warren Doyle, the formidable and influential bishop of Kildare & Leighlin in the 1820s, was from New Ross, Co. Wexford.
Similarly, it is remarkable how many of O’Connell’s political lieutenants in the campaign for Catholic Emancipation came from the south-east. Thomas Wyse from Co. Waterford, who married a Bonaparte, was one such. Another was Richard Lalor Sheil from Co. Kilkenny. Denys Scully was from Kilfeakle, Co. Tipperary. All were hugely influential in their time; all came from wealthy backgrounds. Sheil and Scully were lawyers.
The wealth that sustained this community was nowhere better seen than in Waterford. The English agricultural improver and traveller Arthur Young noted in 1777 that the number of ships registered in Waterford had grown from fewer than thirty to more than eighty in the previous twenty years. Salt beef, butter and salt pork were the principal products traded from Waterford, with the port servicing almost 400 destinations from Britain to Scandinavia, the western Atlantic seaboard, the Caribbean and North America. In 1766, there were about 300 arrivals and departures from the port of Waterford; by 1771, a mere five years later, the equivalent number was 966.
John Roberts (1712–96) was the architect of Georgian Waterford. He was the son of one Thomas Roberts, also an architect whose background — unsurprisingly given the surname — was Welsh. After learning his trade in London, he came back to Waterford, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was engaged by the Anglican bishop of the city, Richard Chenevix, to complete the half-built Bishops’ Palace, which he did. It made his reputation in the city.
He designed many splendid buildings in and around the city, including the City Hall. He was also responsible for the splendid church of St Iberius in Wexford and the Catholic church in Cashel mentioned above.
He designed both cathedrals in Waterford, Anglican and Roman Catholic, each a sensitive assertion in stone of the perceived virtues of the respective confessions. Christ Church, the Anglican cathedral, is all classical cool, chaste and restrained. The Catholic cathedral of the Most Holy Trinity is more exuberant, with hints of the Baroque. This perfectly captures the ascetic restraint of Protestantism and the theatricality of Catholicism: as exercises in architectural tact, in a country not always overflowing with it, these two beautiful churches take some beating.
What takes some believing is the capacity of the Catholic community of Waterford to fund their splendid new cathedral. But that is only so if you believe that the Catholic eighteenth century was a simply a time of unrelieved penal suppression and poverty. In fact, nearly all the penal laws were repealed in the last quarter of the century and in Waterford they hardly mattered anyway, since the Catholic community was in trade and not in land. This was a rich community. It could afford the splendours of Holy Trinity, just as — two generations later, in the adjacent county — the Catholics of Wexford could afford to engage Augustus Welby Pugin, no less, to design St Aidan’s cathedral in Enniscorthy on the eve of the Famine.
All observers of late eighteenth-century Ireland agreed that its poorest parts were wretchedly poor. But that was not the whole story. Many Catholics of the south-east, in particular, were anything from comfortable, to well-to-do, to rich. This was a coherent, self-conscious community and it was from here that the leadership of Irish nationalism — an unblushingly confessional enterprise, despite the enlistment of the occasional virtuous Protestant to the cause — hailed. The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Waterford is evidence of a wealthy, cultivated, self-possessed community, fortunate in its generous architect, who has left this first major Catholic church of the post-penal era as a testament to his own talent and to the assurance of his patrons.
