Yet excavations carried out by archaeologist Franc Myles in 2019 revealed the stone walls of an eighteenth-century Roman Catholic chapel, a building that had spent much of its life deliberately hidden from public view, tucked behind a priest's residence that screened it from the street. The chapel had been built on part of the old Fleet Market, and by 1821 a visitor noted that it stood concealed behind houses on the north side of Townsend Street, large and well appointed inside, but offering nothing to catch the eye from the pavement.

The story behind those walls reaches back further still. In 1709, the Catholic Parish of St. Andrew was established, and its first Parish Priest, the Reverend Patrick Doyle, set up his congregation in a converted stable at the rear of Lord Ely's house on Hawkins Street. The arrangement was precarious; in January 1750, the London and Dublin Gentleman's Magazine reported that a great storm brought a chimney stack crashing through the stable roof during Mass, killing several of the congregation and wounding many others. The man who replaced Doyle around 1733, and who oversaw the parish for nearly half a century, was Dr. Richard Reynolds, a figure of some distinction: he had spent two years as tutor to Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender. It was Reynolds who built the spacious Townsend Street chapel around 1750 to replace the ruinous stable. The building appears clearly on John Rocque's 1756 map of Dublin, marked with a cross, a surprisingly large structure for a community worshipping under significant legal and social constraint. By the 1820s, with £6,000 collected towards a new building, the parish eventually chose to move to a more prominent site, and the first stone of St. Andrew's on Westland Row was laid on 30 April 1832. Several objects from Townsend Street made the journey: the painting of the Descent from the Cross now hanging above the high altar at Westland Row was previously in the same position in the older chapel, and the communion rails were relocated to the parish church at Sandyford, where they remain in use.

There is no chapel to visit today; the site has been redeveloped. What survives is a paper trail and an archaeological record. Rocque's 1756 map, available through various digital archives, shows the chapel's footprint with a clarity that rewards close study. A mural tablet commemorating Dr. Richard Reynolds can be examined in the passage leading into the south transept of St. Andrew's, Westland Row, which is open to visitors. For anyone curious about the Catholic community's layered, often deliberately obscure presence in Georgian Dublin, the church on Westland Row is the place to begin, knowing that the congregation it inherited had once gathered in a stable, survived a falling chimney, and worshipped for decades in a building so well concealed that the street outside gave almost nothing away.