Small rural churches of this type, built in the nineteenth or early twentieth century to replace earlier Mass-house arrangements, are quietly numerous across Connacht, yet individually they rarely attract the attention lavished on grander urban buildings.

The village of Derrybrien itself is better known in recent years in connection with a large wind farm development on the surrounding bogland, and the environmental controversies that followed it, including significant bog subsidence. The church predates that disruption by many decades and belongs instead to the longer story of Catholic parish life reasserting itself in the west of Ireland after the restrictions of the Penal era, when public Catholic worship was suppressed and congregations gathered at outdoor Mass rocks or in modest, unlicensed structures. The gradual construction of permanent parish churches across Galway throughout the 1800s was one of the more visible transformations of the rural Irish landscape, funded largely through local community effort and the contributions of an impoverished farming population.