St Colman's RC Church, Shinn School Road, Shinn, Newry, Co Down, BT34 1PA

St Colman's is a prominent mid-19th-century Neo-classical Roman Catholic church standing in a mature churchyard on the west side of Shinn School Road. The building has developed from an early Roman Catholic chapel of unusual form. A datestone on the front gable records 1834 as the year of erection, and the building is shown and captioned as an RC chapel on the 1834 Ordnance Survey map. According to the 1836 Ordnance Survey Memoir, it was described as "a plain granite building 80ft long and 40 broad" with an unboarded floor and no pews or seats, capable of accommodating 1000 persons, with plans to erect a gallery to increase this to 1500. The structure cost £700 to build initially, with a further £300 expected to complete it, funded by subscription and supplemented by local labour and use of carts to transport materials.

The church is aligned roughly north to south with a pitched natural slate roof and overhanging eaves. The front (south) gable displays a pediment parapet with moulded skews and a stone cross finial. The walls are lined rendered, with a similar basecourse to the left elevation only. The façade is temple-fronted with a chamfered dressed granite basecourse and two plat-bands—one between ground and clerestorey level, and the other at eaves level. Four advanced pilasters with moulded heads divide the façade into three bays, with the central bay being wider, and support the second plat-band. The gable apex has a central pedimented panel inscribed "A.M.D.G.".

The ground floor features a semicircular-headed doorway to the centre, accessed by two granite steps, containing a pair of timber doors. Each door has two elongated panels with round-heads. Above the doorway is a Y-tracery fanlight with leaded and coloured glass featuring floral details. An inset square panel above the entrance door reads "A.D.1834". The left and right bays each have a segmental-headed window with granite cill at ground floor level. These windows are four-paned, with the top panes having depressed Gothic heads, and all are glazed as the fanlight. At first floor (clerestorey), each bay has a similarly detailed six-paned window with a semicircular head.

The left elevation has three segmental-headed recesses to the ground floor, with three clerestorey windows above as those to the façade but with much lower cill levels. The rear elevation is blank and abutted by a single-storey sacristy with a gabled natural slate roof and chimney on the gable, with a modern flue pipe running up the gable end. The sacristy is detailed as the church, with cement-dashed and painted walls and an eight-paned segmental-headed sliding sash window on the end gable. The left cheek (east side) is abutted by a single-storey porch with a hipped natural slate roof and lined rendered walls. The east face of the porch has three small modern semicircular-headed windows with concrete cills and a modern door on the north elevation. The right cheek (west side) has a window as the end gable and is abutted to its left end by a flat-roof plant room with smooth rendered walls and two modern doors on its south face. The right elevation has four segmental-headed recesses to the ground floor, the second from the left having painted granite blocks to the base, possibly indicating a former door. Above are four clerestorey windows as those to the left elevation.

The interior has been modernised but retains some features of interest. A first survey slide from November 1972 shows the exterior of the building unpainted at that time, and it is unlikely that the decorative stucco work dates from 1834, as other local churches of similar date are very plain.

The churchyard setting contains many 19th-century memorials, mostly in granite and including several with Celtic crosses. Front gates on the south boundary are supported on octagonal granite blockwork piers with moulded coping. The gates are wrought iron with spear-headed dog bars and main bars. Flanking the gate piers is a lower rendered screen wall terminated with square-section granite piers and copings. To the northwest of the churchyard is a free-standing bell tower with bolted angled iron. The bell is inscribed "St Colman's / A.M.D.G. / In loving memory of my deceased relative / Margaret O'Hare / Corcreehy / January 1923".