The Work of Human Hands: A discussion of the 1976 Archdiocese of Dublin Parish Church Competition with a focus on de Blacam and Meagher’s Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Firhouse, Co. Dublin. Part 2 Dissertation 2019 Aoife O’Halloran University College Dublin | Ireland Architectural ideas competitions were a tool used in Ireland in the 1970s to commission repeated building types, whose functions were to realise the broad cultural and institutional changes of the previous decade. Far-reaching building campaigns ensued; constructing universities, schools, churches etc. which sought to educate, stimulate and pontificate to a modern Ireland.This essay elucidates one such competition, that of the 1976 Archdiocese of Dublin A Parish Church competition. The competition unselfconsciously narrates a moment in Irish history when bishop and architect aligned to drive their own modernising agendas. These churches carried the dual responsibility of place-making in the newly formed suburbs of Co. Dublin and of extrapolating liturgical change, wrought by the Second Vatican Council, into architectural realities. As an ideas competition, A Parish Church carried implicitly a promise of relief from the restraints of the everyday, presenting a rich moment of experimentation to the Irish architect.As the second most highly subscribed competition in the history of the state, A Parish Church is significant as it served as a scaffold to push architectural practice in Ireland, consuming the generation of Irish architects which pre-empted Group 91 and all that was to follow. Tutor(s) Ellen Rowley