About
PARISH (Preserving And Recording Ireland’s Sacred Heritage) is a collaborative history and heritage project creating a digitised, fully searchable record of Irish church interiors.
Ireland has over 3,000 Catholic churches, mostly built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The products of money donated by local lay people over many years, these buildings are physical embodiments of a community’s history, and contain a wealth of architectural, cultural and social heritage.
Inscriptions on pews, altars, stained-glass windows and other items in church interiors offer rich information on the lives of those who once worshipped in them. They can contain a significant amount of data on local and diaspora populations. Inscriptions offer information donor names – all those Murphys, Kellys, Keoghs, Walshes, O’Briens and so on – but also birth dates, death dates, sometimes addresses, even down to the street number, occupations, and hints on family and social relationships.
Yet demographic and social changes in Ireland today mean that churches are in decreasing use. Buildings are subject to limited opening hours, and some have even been permanently closed, deconsecrated and demolished in recent years. PARISH’s aim is therefore to ‘preserve by record’ these valuable sites. The project will produce an online database containing comprehensive photographic and other data records of the interiors of all Catholic churches on the island of Ireland. This will be a vital ongoing record of the Irish Catholic Church’s infrastructure and the communities that built it.
PARISH is a collaboration between the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and Dr Sarah Roddy, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Maynooth University, Ireland. The project team is keen for interested members of the public to join us in our effort to capture all 3,000 churches. Please see ‘Get involved’ for how you can help.
Project Team
Sarah Roddy is Associate Professor of Irish Social History at Maynooth University, and Principal Investigator of the PARISH project. She was previously Senior Lecturer in Irish History at the University of Manchester, where she also held an Economic and Social Research Council grant on what became the subject of her third monograph, Money and Irish Catholicism: An Intimate History, 1850-1921. This book will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.
Joe Curran is a postdoctoral researcher at Maynooth University. He is a historian interested in churches, charities, and cities. Before working on the PARISH Project, he held a Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin where he explored the connections between Dublin Castle and Dublin city between 1801 and 1923. He has also worked at the University of Edinburgh, Maynooth University’s Centre for Teaching and Learning, and Dublin City Council. He is interested in promoting History outside the academy and is excited to share the PARISH project with a wider audience.