Extract from a lecture by Professor Donal McCartney delivered in 1986. Published by Michael Purcell in "Carlow Past and Present 1987". In the early decades of the 19th century Catholics and Protestants by and large had lived on excellent neighbourly terms with each other. During this period the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, James Doyle (J.K.L.), wrote about the blessings to Ireland which a union of the churches would bring and of the advantages to be derived from the mixed education of Catholics and Protestants, saying that he did not know of any measure which would prepare the way for a better feeling in Ireland than that of uniting children at an early age, and bringing them up in the same school. This was the time when the Protestant gentry of Carlow were helping Fr. Michael MacDonald to build his new church in Killeshin, the foundation stone of which was laid in May 1819 on a site given by William Cooper (of Cooper Hill). Protestants like Col. Bruen, and the Earl of Portarlington made generous financial contributions towards the building fund. To add to the fund a Grand Oratorio and Sermon was organised by the Carlow Protestants under the patronage of Lady Butler, Lady Burgh, Mrs Bruen, Mrs Rochfort, Mrs Cooper and Mrs Fishbourne. Among the gentlemen who acted as collectors on the occasion and who were publicly thanked by the Catholics of Killeshin were Messrs. Browne, Burton, Cooper, Vigors and Fishbourne. When the building was completed in August 1819 the Carlow Morning Post asserted: To the liberality of the Protestant gentry the Catholics are chiefly indebted for the erection of this very handsome building. Most of this good neighbourliness was to change into bitter sectarian feuding a few years later during the 1820s largely as a result, on the one hand , of the launching of the Protestant Evangelical Crusade to convert Irish Catholics to Protestants and the deep resentment which this caused among the Catholic clergy; and, on the other hand, to the launching of Danial O' Connell's Emancipation movement in 1823 and the exaggerated fears which this struck into Protestant breasts. The Evangelical movement in England had chosen Ireland and its Roman Catholic people for a great missionary crusade.