In 1728, a friar named Father Fran Lehy took over a Meeting House in New Row after its Protestant congregation relocated to Eustace Street. His superiors were not pleased; the appropriation of a Dissenting meeting house was considered indiscreet, liable to cause offence, and Lehy was duly reproved. He vacated the premises, a new site was found on Ash Street, and the chapel that eventually rose there, under Father Matthew Lyons in his capacity as Commissary General of the Order, was built in the form described in detail by the Catholic historian Nicholas Donnelly writing in 1904. The interior included an altarpiece depicting the Crucifixion flanked by paintings of the prophets Elias and Eliseus in Carmelite habit, a pulpit, four galleries, a hanging branch before the altar, and a house next door large enough to accommodate six friars.

The Carmelites, a mendicant order tracing their origins to Mount Carmel in the Holy Land, had been present in Dublin since 1274, when their original convent stretched across a substantial plot between Whitefriar Street and Aungier Street. They were expelled from that site in 1542 during the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries and did not return until 1825. In the intervening centuries, their movements through the city were frequent and often forced. Their arrival at Ash Street in 1728 was itself the product of those long migrations, and the chapel served them for over fifty years before, in 1780, the community moved again, this time to what Donnelly describes as the more retired and genteel neighbourhood of French Street, now Upper Mercer Street, where a chapel was built for them in Cuffe Lane. The Ash Street chapel appears on two significant historical maps of the city, Rocque's survey of 1756 and Cooke's Royal Map of 1836, placing it firmly within the documented urban fabric of Catholic Dublin at a period when Catholic worship occupied a careful, often inconspicuous position in the city's geography.

Ash Street still exists off the Coombe, though nothing of the chapel survives above ground. The value of knowing where it stood lies partly in the maps themselves, particularly the Rocque 1756 survey, which shows the chapel sitting adjacent to the parish boundary of St. Nicholas Without, a detail that rewards anyone exploring the layered jurisdictions of early modern Dublin. Researchers interested in the period should note Donnelly's 1904 compilation of Catholic chapel records and N.T. Burke's 1974 article in Archivium Hibernicum, which examines the broader structure of Catholic Dublin in the mid-eighteenth century and provides useful context for understanding how places like Ash Street fitted into a city where Catholic institutions were required to be present yet not conspicuous.