Holy Trinity Church

Stand on Parliament Bridge and look east along the south channel. The pale spire rising straight out of the quay wall, doubled in the water when the tide is slack, is Holy Trinity. It is the Capuchin church of Cork, and it stands on Father Mathew Quay because Father Mathew built it. The priest who talked half of Ireland into giving up drink wanted a great church for the poor of the south parish, and this is the one he started.

The priest's church

Theobald Mathew came to Cork as a young Capuchin friar in 1814 and spent the next quarter century among the poorest streets in the city. In October 1832 he laid the foundation stone for a new church on the quay, with George Pain, the architect of half of Georgian Cork, drawing the plans in the Gothic style. Then the money ran out, as it kept doing. The famine came, Mathew spent what he had on soup and coffins, and the church stood roofless for years. It opened in 1850. Mathew died in 1856 without ever seeing a spire on it. The tall pierced lantern that makes the building a landmark went up in 1890, more than thirty years after his funeral, paid for by the friars and parishioners who came after him. The church grew the way his movement had: slowly, and out of small subscriptions.

The lantern on the river

The spire is the whole point of it. It is pierced right through, so the sky shows in the stonework, and it lifts the eye up from the flat line of the quays. From any of the bridges downstream the church reads as one bright vertical stroke, a light answer to the heavy triple spires of St Fin Barre's up the hill. Go in if the door is open. The nave is taller than you expect from the street, lit by long windows above the traffic noise, and the Capuchins still say Mass there every day.

Father Mathew Quay

The quay took his name, and so did the church: its full title is the Father Mathew Memorial Church. Stand at the river wall opposite and you get the whole story in one look. The water that carried Cork's butter and beef out to the world, the bridges that replaced the old ferries, and the spire of a church that one priest talked a poor parish into raising over sixty years. Five minutes' walk away, at the top of St Patrick's Street, his statue is still pointing down Pana.

On the walk

We stop on the quay across from Holy Trinity and tell the story of the priest who built it: the pledge, the millions who took it, the famine that swallowed his money, and the church his parish finished for him thirty years after he was gone.