In Charleville, north County Cork, that logic was quietly reversed. A Catholic chapel built in 1812, superseded nearly a century later by a larger church, was converted into a two-storey parochial hall, and its Corinthian reredos, the ornamental screen that once framed the altar, was kept in place and pressed into service as a stage backdrop. Sacred architecture and community theatre sharing the same wall, separated only by a change of function.

The building dates its own construction with unusual specificity: the keystone above the central round-headed door in the south-east entrance gable is inscribed with the year 1812. The façade follows a composed arrangement, a wide central doorway flanked by two narrower ones, the walls rendered but with ashlar limestone quoins, the squared corner stones, left exposed. Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, described the interior in admiring terms, noting hewn-stone cornices and window mouldings, a large and elegant altar embellished with paintings of what he considered superior quality, and a cupola added to the chapel in 1829. By 1900 the congregation had outgrown it, and a new Catholic church was built to the north-west. The old chapel, rather than falling into ruin or demolition, was adapted and divided into two storeys for use as a parish hall, a fate that preserved its shell while transforming everything within, except, notably, that reredos.