There is no such thing as a distinctively Irish architectural movement. In the period 1840-80, architectural historians like George Petrie, the 3rd Earl of Dunraven, and Margaret Stokes did identify historical Irish building styles, e.g. a form of Irish Romanesque, which occasionally were used for inspiration in later ecclesiastical architecture (e.g. St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, 1904); but on the whole Ireland participated in the general British trend for the Neo-Gothic, with Pugin and his school contributing churches and chapels both to Anglicans (George Edmund Street’s Neo-Gothic reconstructions of St Brigid’s Cathedral in Kildare, 1896, and Christ Church, Dublin, 1871-78) and (following the relaxation of anti-Catholic legislation in 1828), to Catholics. The earliest Catholic ecclesiastical buildings after Catholic Emancipation were the Cathedral of the Assumption, Tuam, designed by Dominic Madden and built between 1827 and 1837 (tower added in 1859), and St Muredach’s Cathedral, Ballina (instigated by John MacHale). Noteworthy later examples are William Burges’s St Fin Barre Cathedral in Cork, 1879, and J.J. McCarthy’s chapel at Maynooth College, 1891. A remarkable secular example of Neo-Gothic is Adare Manor, built for Lord Dunraven, 1862.

From 1867, the trade journal The Irish builder also functioned as a forum for national-historicist reflection. One historical, distinctively Irish building type that gained immense iconic value was the round tower, and some replica round towers were erected as follies or graveyard monuments (e.g. that of Daniel O’Connell in Glasnevin Cemetary, Dublin, 1857), alongside the “Celtic” cross or high cross. These were prominent mainly as design elements and national symbols as part of an eclectic “retro” architecture, a good example being the Honan Chapel of University College Cork.