The site retains enough of its original fabric to read as what it was: an institution built for containment, order, and the management of poverty. A stretch of enclosing stone wall, standing to roughly five metres in height, runs along the eastern, southern, and western perimeters, and gives a sense of how deliberately sealed off this world once was from the city beyond the avenue that led in from Douglas Road.

The workhouse was a product of the Poor Law system, under which boards of guardians across Ireland were empowered to construct and administer institutions that would house the destitute in exchange for labour. The Skahabeg complex followed the characteristic layout: a two-storey warden's house on the northern side, built in ashlar limestone with elliptical-headed arcading across its central three bays and stone stairs rising on either side to first-floor doors, gave an impression of civic solidity at the entrance. Behind it, a large central accommodation block ran east to west, a sixteen-bay, three-storey structure with gabled attic windows and double-gable-ended terminals set at right angles to form an H-plan. That block was demolished in 1986. A two-storey infirmary range in random rubble limestone with brick detailing survives to the south, and a connecting north-south range, once linking the accommodation block to the infirmary, is now used as a Roman Catholic chapel; two square lantern lights still run along its ridge.

The hospital that grew around these bones expanded considerably over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, absorbing and obscuring much of the original workhouse arrangement. The warden's house, no longer in use, carries modern additions to its rear. The infirmary range endures, still recognisable in its materials and massing. Together, these surviving structures make an unshowy record of how a building type designed for the worst years of the nineteenth century gradually became something else, without quite forgetting what it had been.