The settlement of Ballingarry, whose name derives from the Irish Baile an Gharraí, meaning roughly "the townland of the garden" or enclosed cultivated ground, is a small rural place, and its church represents the kind of modest but locally significant religious architecture that multiplied across rural Ireland in the decades following Catholic Emancipation in 1829. That period saw an enormous wave of church construction as Catholic communities, long restricted in their ability to build freely, began erecting permanent places of worship to replace the informal or improvised arrangements of the Penal era.