Some years ago an American woman at a dinner party suggested: "Why doesn't the Church of Ireland give Christ Church back to the Catholics?" The other guests, all Catholic, were horrified. "Can't you just imagine what they'd do to it," one man said. She had innocently stumbled on one of the most notorious aspects of Catholicism in Ireland: its infamous wrecking of its churches and cathedrals. One notorious example was what happened to the great Pugin's Irish masterpiece, Killarney Cathedral. The local bishop, Eamon Casey, spent a third of a million pounds in the 1970s gutting Pugin's interior. In the end all that was left were those bits salvaged by the locals in the hope that some day a bishop with more taste would restore Pugin's masterpiece. Victorian Gothic churches in Ireland have been destroyed at a horrifying rate. Most regard St Macartan's Cathedral in Monaghan as the gem of the Irish Pugin, J J McCarthy. It had its sanctuary gutted, and replaced by something that looks like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, with the bishop on his throne like a clerical Captain Kirk. In a Victorian Gothic building it is chronically out of place.
