Church of the Immaculate Conception, Dublin, Roman Catholic church in Merchants Quay, Dublin, Ireland.
The Church of the Immaculate Conception, known as Adam and Eve's, stands on Merchants Quay, run by the Franciscans. Patrick Byrne's 1834 design went unbuilt as planned: money ran out, so the church was erected without a nave or tower. After 1900 the altar was moved to the left wall, the old sanctuary became a transept with a Cook Street entrance, a small nave was added on the right and a dome raised over the sanctuary. A circular apse followed in 1926.
The building was founded in 1834 and dedicated to the Immaculate Conception in 1889. It replaced an earlier church from 1759 that stood on the same site.
The church's popular name, Adam and Eve's, comes from the Adam and Eve Tavern, where Franciscans secretly celebrated Mass. It appears in James Joyce's Ulysses, Dubliners and Finnegans Wake, whose opening line runs "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's". Since 1930 it has been linked to the 61st Dublin Scouting Ireland Group.
The church sits on Merchants Quay by the River Liffey, with a later entrance from Cook Street and another from Skippers Alley. The 1926 layout places the high altar in a circular apse, so walk the full circuit to see the transepts and the shrine of Saint Anthony added in 1912. Look up at the organ case, where seventy gilded pipes are set into the woodwork.
The organ, built by T.W. Magahy in 1936 with pipework from the earlier Telford instrument, was rebuilt by Trevor Crowe Ltd in 1996. It holds around 3,000 pipes, seventy of them gilded and set into the casework, and is claimed to be the largest pipe organ in a Catholic church in Dublin.
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