St. Patrick's Cathedral in Armagh, Northern Ireland is the seat of the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland. It was built in various phases between 1840 and 1904 to serve as the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Archdiocese of Armagh, the original Medieval Cathedral of St. Patrick having been appropriated by the state church called the Church of Ireland at the time of the Irish Reformation. The Cathedral stands on a hill, as does its Anglican counterpart. Background The building of a Catholic cathedral at Armagh was a task imbued with great historic and political symbolism. Armagh was the Primatial seat of Ireland and its ancient ecclesiastical capital. Yet, since the Irish Reformation under Henry VIII, no Catholic Archbishop had resided there. Since the seventeenth century, the majority Catholic population of Ireland had lived under the rigours of the Penal Laws, a series of enactments which were designed, in the words of the Anglo-Irish historian Lecky, "to deprive Catholics of all civil life; to reduce them to a condition of extreme, brutal ignorance; and, to disassociate them from the soil". As a result, whilst to some extent tolerated, the public practice of Catholicism was almost completely extinguished and all Churches existent at the time of the enactment of the laws were ceded to the Established Church. Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century, there were few Catholic churches and no cathedrals in existence in Ireland for a large Catholic population. Following Catholic emancipation in 1829, the need to construct churches and cathedrals to serve this population became apparent. The lack of a Catholic presence in the Primatial City of Armagh in particular became a popular cause of discontent among the emerging Catholic episcopacy, clergy and congregation. The cathedral of Primate Crolly Archbishop William Crolly was appointed to the Catholic See of Armagh in 1835 and almost immediately sought permission to reside in Armagh; the first Catholic Primate to do so since the Reformation. Having settled in the town, he then set about seeking a site for a new Catholic cathedral. The main difficulty in constructing a Catholic cathedral at Armagh was that the land of Armagh City and suburbs consisted almost entirely of "see-land", the mensal estate or demesne of the Protestant Primate and thus would not be available for the Catholic episcopacy to purchase. A site at the apex of Sandy Hill on the outskirts of