the town had however been sold to the Earl of Dartrey. A building committee was established and a weekly penny collection taken in for the construction project. The architect was to be Thomas Duff of Newry who had designed the Cathedral there and also the Pro-Cathedral at Dundalk. He designed a cruciform building, with nave, aisles, transepts, chancel, and choir; a large square central tower, and two smaller ones on the west front flanking the great doorway, and flush with the aisle walls, resembling York Minster. As at Dundalk, the style was a highly romanticised version of the Perpendicular Gothic of the sixteenth century. The foundation stone was laid on St Patrick's Day 1838 but as a result of the Irish Famine, work ground to a halt in 1847 with the foundations and aisles only partially complete. The cathedral of Primates Dixon and McGettigan Archbishop Crolly was himself a victim of the famine, contracting cholera whilst tending to famine ravaged Drogheda and dying on Good Friday 1849, and was buried in the unfinished cathedral. His successor, Archbishop Paul Cullen abandoned the project and moved the Primatial See to Drogheda. It was only when Cullen was translated to Dublin and Archbishop Joseph Dixon was appointed to the See of Armagh that work recommenced in 1854. By this time, Duff was dead and there had been a revolution in ecclesiastical architectural taste in Ireland. Following visits to Ireland by A. W. N. Pugin, the Perpendicular Gothic style of the sixteenth century had fallen from favour and earlier Medieval Gothic had become more popular. The architect James Joseph McCarthy, a self-styled "pupil" of Pugin, was appointed to oversee the completion of the cathedral. The position as architect to the new cathedral was rather a difficult one for, by the time of McCarthy's appointment, the walls of Duff's Perpendicular building were already high and had reached the top of the aisles. McCarthy did not wish to continue to build in the now unfashionable Perpendicular Gothic of Duff. His solution was to start building a Decorated Gothic Cathedral of the fourteenth century on top of the purportedly sixteenth century foundations and walls. Decorated Gothic tracery was inserted into the existing window openings and at the West end, he reduced the size of the traceried window and inserted below it an arcade of apostolic statues. The pitch of Duff's roof was raised a full , adding