That is not the sort of ecclesiastical biography that appears on plaques. By the time the 1892 Ordnance Survey sheet was printed, the site was annotated simply as "Munster and Leinster Bank, Site of St. Andrew's Church," which is perhaps the most Dublin of all possible epitaphs: a building that survived for centuries, only to be commemorated by a bank.

The origins of St. Andrew's stretch back to at least the twelfth century, and possibly earlier. The near-contemporary chronicle of Roger of Hoveden records that when Henry II had his palace built in 1171, it stood outside the city walls "near the church of St Andrew," placing the building firmly in existence before the Normans had properly settled into Dublin. By 1219 the church had been assigned to the precentor of St. Patrick's Cathedral, a connection that would persist for centuries in the form of an annual payment of ten pounds. John Speed's 1610 map of Dublin depicts it clearly: a rectangular building oriented east to west, with a bell-tower at its western end, sitting within a D-shaped enclosure that represented its graveyard. That semi-circular cemetery form is notably similar to enclosures found around early Christian church sites in rural Ireland, suggesting the ground itself may carry memories older than any documentary record. The graveyard was also, according to the historian Gilbert, the location where the curious civic ceremony of electing the "mayor of the bull-ring" took place until around 1600. After the Reformation the church passed into lay hands, suffered severe damage during the Nine Years War, and was pressed into service as a stable and, at some point, as a mint. A petition to restore it was filed in 1631, but the building was demolished before the Restoration of Charles II. The Irish Parliament passed an Act in 1665 recreating the parish, and between 1670 and 1674 a new church, designed by William Dodson in an unusual elliptical form, was built nearby on what had been a bowling green donated by Henry Jones, Bishop of Meath.

The medieval site itself is not accessible or marked in any conventional sense; it lies beneath Dame Street at a point roughly opposite the City Hall. The Suffolk Street church that replaced it, built to Dodson's oval plan and rebuilt again in the nineteenth century, is the visible successor to this long sequence of use and loss. For those interested in the earlier layers, Speed's 1610 map is available to view online through Cambridge University Library's digital collections, and it rewards close attention: Dame Gate, the eastern entrance to the walled city, appears just to the west of the church, with the D-shaped graveyard enclosure clearly legible beside it.