The rest of the church around it is Victorian, rebuilt entirely in 1878 to 1879, but the tower itself is early eighteenth century, and the tradition it embodies is considerably older than that.

The story of why a church was built here at all begins with a practical problem. Late in the seventeenth century, the Protestant community of Ringsend found itself cut off from its parish church at Donnybrook with uncomfortable regularity. The culprit was the River Dodder, which flooded unpredictably and made the road to Donnybrook impassable. The congregation, which had recently grown with the arrival of revenue and customs officials posted to the village, petitioned for a church closer to home. An act of parliament was passed in 1703, a site was chosen near the seashore at Irishtown, and the building of the Royal Chapel of Saint Matthew at Ringsend began in 1704, completed by the Corporation by 1706. The tower followed a few years later, built in 1713 by a builder named Richard Mills. The architectural scholar Maurice Craig, writing in 1969, identified the stepped battlements of that tower as perhaps the closing expression of a distinctly Irish medieval form, persisting into the Georgian era long after it had faded elsewhere.

The church sits on Irishtown Road, close to the strand, in a part of Dublin that retains traces of its old village character despite the surrounding urban sprawl. The Victorian nave is plain and functional, and it is easy to walk past without registering the tower as anything other than an ordinary church feature. Looking up at the battlements is the thing worth doing, taking a moment to trace the stepped profile and consider that what looks like a modest decorative choice is, according to those who study such things, the tail end of a centuries-long building tradition.