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Virtual Tour

A Window on Baggot Street

In 1822 William Callaghan left his fortune to a woman called Catherine McAuley. Catherine was a woman with a deep love for God and God’s poor. After receiving the inheritance she funded and built this large house on the corner of the fashionable Baggot Street and Herbert Street. The corner stone of the original house was blessed in July 1824 by Very Rev. Michael Blake. It was called the “House of Mercy” and was intended as a refuge for distressed women. It contained school rooms and an oratory and opened its door to Dublin’s poor and needy. The location of the house ensured that the poor would be visible to the rich and that the young women would have employment opportunities.

Other likeminded women joined Catherine. They soon became involved in teaching in the poor schools and nursing and the sick and dying in their own homes and hospitals during the cholera and other epidemics. They worked as lay women. When it became clear that in order to give stability to their good works Catherine agreed to form a new type of religious congregation. The House of Mercy became the Convent of Mercy. From this small beginning it grew and today Sisters and Associates are working in over forty countries throughout the world.

The house was restored in 1994 and is now the Mercy International Centre and home to the Mercy Family from all over the globe. People from many countries now come to visit Catherine’s original foundation. The house is a centre of Hospitality to all who come. It is a place of pilgrimage and renewal for those who want to spend time and touch into the spirit of Catherine. Her chapel, room and grave are special places of pilgrimage. It is a Heritage Centre and holds many precious objects belonging to Catherine. As well as representing the origins of the Sisters of Mercy and its links with the past it calls and challenges the Mercy family of today to hear the cries of the poor that have assumed global proportions and to link to one another in order “to create ways of bridging the gap between those who are rich and those who are poor” (MIA VISION STATEMENT 2006).