In Dublin folklore, facts need not interfere with stories. A particularly good story concerns the dome roof of the magnificent Mary Immaculate of Sinners church, on Rathmines Road. The impressive feature is said to have been constructed in Glasgow, and (allegedly) it was originally destined for an Orthodox church in Russia prior to the Bolshevik revolution.
The story isn’t true of course, but there are some remarkable real tales in this building. On January 26th 1920, the Rathmines church was ravaged by flames, with a journalist noting that flames were ‘spreading with alarming rapidity in all parts of the building, and mounting up the walls to the base of the spacious dome.’ The dome roof came crashing down, narrowly missing firefighters below. It wasn’t only the Catholic church who were distraught by the blaze however. The fire also troubled the IRA leadership in the city as, little did the authorities know, but the church was in fact serving as something of an arms dump.
According to one Dublin Brigade IRA Volunteer of the time, the Clerk of the church was a member of the IRA himself, and ‘in pursuance of his military duties, he utilised some of the vaults in the Church as a dump for the major portion of the Company’s arms and equipment.’ You would be forgiven for thinking that in the aftermath of the blaze, the storing of such items in a church would become public knowledge. Perhaps it would have, were it not for the fact that the head of the Dublin Fire Brigade at the time, John Myers, was more than sympathetic to the cause of the revolutionaries. As one IRA volunteer remembered, ‘I told him the true story and asked him to see that the Rathmines people got no inkling whatever… The incident passed unnoticed by anybody.’
Myers was described by IRA Volunteer Michael Lynch as ‘a very fine fellow, and, from the national point of view, thoroughly sound and reliable in every way.’ Myers later found his place in history thanks to Joyce, who gave him a mention in the pages of Ulysses. It took five months of frantic work before the church was in any condition to reopen, thanks to the hard work of the architect RH Byrne and his team. The new dome roof? It was constructed in Dublin and in-place by 1923, replacing the temporary roof.
Donal Fallon is one of the trio behind the Dublin social history website ‘Come Here To Me’ (www.comeheretome.com) and author of The Pillar: The Life and Afterlife of the Nelson Pillar.
Words: Donal Fallon
Image: Comeheretome
