Known as Our Lady of Dublin, it is a standing Madonna holding the Christ Child in her left hand, his feet resting in her right, with one of the Child's arms a later replacement. Scholars believe it originated in the Cistercian house of St Mary's Abbey, a quite separate foundation on the north side of the city. How exactly it came to rest here, in a church built in 1825 on the bones of an entirely different medieval community, is not fully recorded. That quiet displacement, a statue from one dissolved house sheltered in the rebuilt premises of another, says something about what survived the reformations of the sixteenth century and what did not.

The story of the site itself is tangled. According to the antiquary Ware, the Carmelite friary here was founded in 1274 by Sir Robert Baggot, chief justice, though the actual sequence was more complicated. In 1278, Roger Oweyne, James de Birmingham, and Nicholas Bacuir granted land to the friars within the city, but the citizens refused to allow building. The friars then turned to Baggot, who acquired land for them in the southern suburbs, purchasing it from the Cistercian abbey of Baltinglass in County Wicklow. A licence to enclose land was granted in 1280, suggesting construction was then under way. The priory grew into a substantial complex: an inquisition of 1530 recorded a church, steeple, chapter-house, dormitory, two chambers, a hall, an orchard, nine messuages, seven gardens, and two meadows, amounting to eleven acres in total. The Great Hall served, at least occasionally, as a venue for parliamentary business; in 1333, Murcadh Mac Nicol Ua Tuathail of Imayle was murdered in Dublin while a parliament was sitting there. After the friary's surrender in 1539, jurors examining the site in August 1541 found the church and most buildings already demolished, with only a small hall, a room, and a stable with two cellars remaining. The property passed to Nicholas Stanyhurst and later to Francis Aungier, first Baron Longford. A carved headstone discovered in 1886 during excavations at the rear of the site was tentatively identified by a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland as bearing the effigies of Sir Francis Aungier and his wife.

The present church was designed by architect George Papworth, with its foundation stone laid on 25 October 1825 by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Murray, and consecrated by the same archbishop on 11 November 1827. It was built at the initiative of Rev. John Spratt, then Prior of the order, on a narrow plot in what was then York Row. The building was extended northward in 1856 and again in 1863, with the later additions divided from the earlier structure by chiselled limestone columns. The church is on Whitefriar Street, a short walk south of Dame Street in Dublin city centre. The statue of Our Lady of Dublin is kept inside and is accessible during normal opening hours; it sits somewhat quietly among the other furnishings, easy to overlook without knowing what it is or where it may originally have come from.