For many centuries, as Étain Murphy has shown in this magnificent account of the history of Monkstown Church and parish, there has been a strong link with Christ Church Cathedral. In medieval times the cathedral priory had been one of the major landowners in Ireland its granges (or farms) can still be seen in titles such as Dean's Grange and Grangegorman. The greater Monkstown area and the many parishes since formed from it are all part of the general southwards move of the city as the eighteenth century came to an end. Nineteenth-century innovation (the development of the port of Dunleary/Kingstown/Dun Laoghaire), the ease of travel provided by Ireland's first railway line, which ran through the parish, and the alleged health values of sea air for an prosperous middle class all ensured a rapid rise in population and the need for unprecedented church-building. increasingly
Interestingly, the rapid rise of Monkstown coincided with the rapid nineteenth-century decline of the fortunes of the cathedral. The move of the Four Courts from the cathedral precincts to Gandon's new building and the increasing disrepair of the fabric both increased its decline. Yet in that same period, at a time when the cathedral was falling into serious structural decay, and from which it was not saved until 1870, the daughter parish rebuilt it's church on a new site and then enlarged it on a number of occasions. The link, of course, was essentially the right of the dean to appoint the perpetual curate of Monkstown. The position of dean of Christ Church, one of the wealthiest freeholds in Ireland, had in 1686 been given to support the poverty-stricken diocese of Kildare, the two offices to be held in commendam, and each successive bishop-dean continued to appoint each successive incumbent until the 1833 Church Temporalities Act. This added Kildare diocese to Dublin on the death of Bishop Lindsay in 1846 and gave the right of appointment to the archbishop. Disestablishment in 1871 abolished even this patronage and the cathedral's links with its prosperous daughter ceased.
This book, however, is far more than a history of church re-building. It bursts with vivid stories about the people of the parish both laity and clergy and the stories indicate that not all those eulogised on the many mural monuments were quite the knights in shining armour that their elegantly scripted memorials might have us believe. The author has done us a real favour by giving us history that includes warts and all.
Monkstown on the whole was a parish of the wealthy, with pew rents in operation until well into the twentieth century. Not that there was any shortage of poor Protestants in the parish. Indeed, we are told that at the reopening of the 1831 church there were 400 poor people who attended. There was even the establishment of a parish poor fund from which people of all denominations were supposed to be given aid. The author, late in the book indicates that Roman Catholics, as a percentage of the poor, may just possibly have received less than a percentage share of such funds.