Qualla: St Eugene's Cathedral

St Eugene's Cathedral: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. It took a parliament to allow this cathedral. Until the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, building anything as visibly Catholic as a cathedral in a city like Derry was not legally possible. Fundraising began only in 1840. Construction started in 1849, the year the Great Famine was finally lifting from the worst-affected parts of Ireland. The total cost of building St Eugene's came to just over £40,000 - a sum collected mostly in small donations from a community emerging from catastrophe. About £4,000 of it came from America, sent home by Irish emigrants. When the cathedral finally opened on 4 May 1873, twenty-four years after construction began, the windows were plain glass and the bell tower had no spire. Both would come later. The money had run out at exactly the cathedral's roofline.

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Eugene's Cathedral: Forty Thousand Pounds, Slowly

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. James Joseph McCarthy, an architect who had designed cathedrals across Ireland, drew the plans. The style is neo-Gothic in the simpler key common to nineteenth-century Irish Catholic churches built on tight budgets. The site sits at the junction of Francis Street and Creggan Stre...

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Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Eugene's Cathedral: Bishop Edward Daly

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 8 August 2016 Bishop Edward Daly died at the age of 82. He had been Bishop of Derry from 1974 to 1993 - but he was known to the world for something he had done before he was a bishop, when he was a Father Daly during Bloody Sunday in 1972. A photograph taken that day shows him...

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Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Eugene's Cathedral: The Year of Culture

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Burchell, CC BY-SA 4.0. During Holy Week of 2013, the Good Friday liturgy and the Easter Vigil from St Eugene's were broadcast live by RTE, the Republic of Ireland's state broadcaster, with both ceremonies transmitted across Europe through Eurovision. The broadcasts marked Derry's year as the inaugural ...

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Image: Simon Burchell | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Eugene's Cathedral: Templemore Parish

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarkusMark, CC BY-SA 3.0. St Eugene's and the Long Tower together form the Templemore Parish - the only parish in Ireland with both a cathedral and a much older parish church. Bishop McKeown is parish priest of both, an unusually direct involvement of a bishop in pastoral life. The cathedral's bells ring ...

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Image: MarkusMark | CC BY-SA 3.0