The school lies on the western fringes of Dublin’s inner city, part of the civic and domestic infrastructure that came with the arrival of the railways to Ireland and in particular to service the local railway works in Inchicore. The architect’s brief was to provide new classrooms, resource rooms, staff facilities and a new multi-purpose hall to relieve pressure in the old building. The existing school occupies a very constricted triangular site enclosed by a limestone wall, bounded on two sides by roads and on the third by the railway workers’ houses. A stand of chestnut trees occupies the south edge of the schoolyard straddling the wall and extending across the street. Among these trees a new building is sited, set perpendicular to the old, making a south-east facing entrance courtyard now accessible from the village via a new gateway cut into the boundary wall.
