Building for Faith I: Church of Ireland

First Fruits Churches

Stuart Kinsella

There in pinnacled protection,
One extinguished family waits
A Church of Ireland resurrection
By the broken, rusty gates.

Passing through the Irish countryside, one of the most distinguishing features is the pricking of the skyline by the pinnacles noted above by the poet and spy, John Betjeman. These western towers, with or without spires, demarked sometimes quite sober looking hall churches in both rural and urban landscapes. Built mostly towards the end of the long reign of King George III (1760-1820), they were known as ‘First Fruits’ churches (5.1).

They all belong to the Church of Ireland (or, between 1800 and 1871, the United Churches of England and Ireland). They were erected in a sustained period between 1777 and 1823, with an extraordinary flurry of building activity between 1810 and 1816, such that, by 1822, fifty percent of Church of Ireland churches had been rebuilt. A legal clause of 1772 only permitted the funding of a new church in Ireland if the old one had been ruined for twenty years, so the sad corollary is that half of Ireland’s medieval churches (held by the Established Church, the Church of Ireland being the state church since the Reformation) were allowed, by neglect, to crumble away.

The term ‘First Fruits’ (Proverbs 3:9) came from a tax on clerical income sent to the Papacy in Rome during the medieval period. King Henry VIII sequestered this to the English crown in 1534. In 1704, Queen Anne redirected proceeds to poorer English clergy (Queen Anne’s Bounty), and through the intervention of writer and later Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift, a version of it in Ireland saw the establishment of the Board of First Fruits in 1711. The Board was controlled by the bishops of the Church of Ireland and empowered to build and improve their churches and the glebe houses which accommodated their clergy. Little activity took place until after 1777 when the Irish parliament increased the allocation of funds. Funding was increased again following the Union. Worth noting is that this Irish activity predated the Church Building Act of 1818 which saw 612 churches built in England by 1856.

Politically, the reason for such a surge in buildings of the Church of Ireland is not difficult to see. In the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion and the passing of the Act of Union in 1800, members of the Church of Ireland, a mere eleven percent of the population at the time, understandably felt under threat. The Board of First Fruits was a means of dispensing governmental largesse to this minority population through the mechanism of architectural renewal. This was coupled with a spiritual renewal, the so-called ‘Second Reformation’, where a surge of evangelism attempted to convert the entire population to the Anglican faith.

As architect of the Board of First Fruits from 1784 to 1814 (and of the Board of Works from 1805), Francis Johnston played his part in designing churches during this time (and perhaps in the promotion of bells, as an avid campanologist). His range as an architect was wide, exemplified in his unusual elliptical or ‘Round Church’ of St Andrew’s (1800-7), his glorious St Martin-in-the-Fields-inspired classical St George’s at Hardwicke Place (1801-14), and his gothic Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle (1807-14), all in the capital, providing ample inspiration for subsequent Irish ecclesiastical architects. His St Catherine’s in Tullamore (1808-18), combined elements of his chapel royal in Dublin with those of Cooley’s First Fruits designs (5.3).

The most active episcopal supporters of this architectural revitalising were William Stuart, Archbishop of Armagh (1800-22), and Charles Broderick, Archbishop of Cashel (1801-22), who later became co-adjutor Archbishop of Dublin (1811-20) following the mental incapacity of its then incumbent, Euseby Cleaver. This is reflected in the statistics that forty-one percent of First Fruits churches were in the ecclesiastical province of Armagh, and twenty-two percent and twenty-seven percent respectively in Dublin and Cashel. A mere eight percent were built in the province of Tuam. An unusually high number of churches built in Meath, such as Castlejordan (c.1820) represented the building enthusiasm of Thomas Lewis O’Beirne, Bishop of Meath (1798-1823), a former Roman Catholic who converted to the Church of Ireland in 1773.

Dublin architect, John Bowden, succeeded Johnston as architect to the Board of First Fruits from about 1814 until 1821, and continued in its traditional style, sometimes classical, such as St George’s, Belfast (1811-16) and St Stephen’s ‘Pepper Canister’, Dublin (1820-4), but mostly gothic, such as Tarmonbarry, Co. Roscommon (1813), Magorban, Co. Tipperary (1814), and Tartaraghan, Co. Armagh (1816). After Bowden’s death in 1822, the Board of First Fruits split the position into four, one for each ecclesiastical province, and in April 1823 appointed William Farrell (Armagh), John Semple (Dublin), James Pain (Cashel) and Joseph Welland (Tuam), which allowed for the development of some regional variation.

Elsewhere, the province of Cashel was overseen by James Pain (who settled in Limerick), assisted by his brother, George Richard Pain (who settled in Cork). Both were from a family of architects and, uniquely of the Board’s four provincial practices, trained in England, with John Nash in London. Like Semple, James’s style was distinctive, using stocky west towers often rising to octagons at belfry level with needle spires, and adding low vestries at the east end appended at angles to the north and south of the east window. Their churches include, for example, St John the Baptist, Midleton (1823) (5.6), St Mary’s Carrigaline (1823-4), St Mary’s, Castletownroche (1825) and St John’s, Buttevant (1826) and St George’s, Mitchelstown (1830), all Co. Cork.

Joseph Welland, born in Midleton, Co. Cork, was appointed to the province of Tuam. Trained under John Bowden, stylistically his churches represented a seamless continuity of the Board of First Fruits’ expressed aims. They included Booterstown, Co. Dublin (1821-4), Kilfree (Gurteen), Co. Sligo (1824) (5.7), Kilcolman, Claremorris, Co. Mayo (1828), Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo (1830), Aille (c.1830) and Oranmore (1831), both Co. Galway, and Ballymote (1832) and Kilmacteige (c.1832) both Co. Sligo. At Oranmore and Kilmacteige, Welland also began to use a more economical style, dispensing with the characteristic west tower for the rather humble bell-cote above the west gable (doubtless obliging some bell casting).