This remark by Dean Mease, published shortly after his appointment as Dean in 1913, was not the first attempt made to draw the attention of the public to services at the Chapel Royal. Following the summer vacation in 1907, several notices appeared in the press announcing the recommencement of Sunday services and noting: ‘The chapel is open to the public for these services, which are fully choral.’ Such efforts to promote the Chapel would suggest that the staff believed the general public to be ignorant of (or perhaps apathetic to) the choral services there. This is no doubt one of the reasons that the choral foundation was so quickly forgotten after the Chapel's closure in December 1922.

The sudden disbandment of the Chapel Royal was part of the gradual winding-up of the Dublin Castle regime as the new independent Irish state was established, which began with the appointment of the Provisional Government and the symbolic handover of the Castle in January 1922. During the year that followed, the Castle government gradually transferred its functions to the new Provisional Government in preparation for the establishment of the Irish Free State. The viceregal household was gradually dissolved, and in August 1922 a civil servant described the Castle as ‘all but deserted […] the life has gone from it’. Nonetheless, services continued at the Chapel Royal, even after the Lord Lieutenancy was abolished with the inception of the Free State on 6th December 1922.

The determination of Hugh Jackson Lawlor and the staff of the Chapel's choral foundation to maintain services there even when the Chapel's constitutional raison d’être had ceased shows their determination to present the Chapel not merely as an appendage of the Lord Lieutenancy but as an independent institution worthy of preservation in the new constitutional order. This also shows how little the violence and division of the ongoing Irish Civil War seems to have touched the Chapel Royal. In contrast, the Irish government quite understandably did not consider the maintenance of the Chapel to be a priority, since civil war threatened the very survival of the new Free State. Thus, the Chapel quickly succumbed to political vicissitude, along with the rest of the institutions of the former viceregal establishment.