St Mary, SWANLINBAR, Chapel Square, Roman Catholic

A church of striking modern design built to replace an earlier structure destroyed in a bombing in 1976. Characteristic of the Modern style favoured by the Roman Catholic Church in the decades after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the design by Hubert Duffy is a composition of volumes reflecting the internal spatial arrangement with a Modernist belfry to add verticality to the composition and to mark the position of the church within the town. Following the precepts of the Modern Movement, structure and light are the central architectural features of the interior, with natural light introduced to highlight the altar and sanctuary as the central focus of the space. The church adds a notable twentieth-century layer to the predominantly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century streetscape of Swanlinbar.

[National Inventory of Architectural Heritage]