02-05-2025
Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin on faith, family, identity and her debut novel
Writer Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin introduces her debut novel Ordinary Saints, an exploration of family, grief, queer identity, and the legacy of the Catholic Church in Ireland.
In October 2020, I read a news story about the Italian teenager Carlo Acutis who, this week, will become the first millennial saint. Until then, I'm not sure I believed in creative lightning bolts. But as soon as I read that article, I saw the shape of what would become my first novel, Ordinary Saints.
It tells the story of Jay, a queer Irish woman living in London. She's fiercely independent, borderline estranged from her parents, and determined to ignore her past. She has a group of close friends and a new girlfriend she's really into, but she tells them hardly anything about her life growing up, including the fact that her older brother Ferdia, a trainee priest, was killed in an accident when he was 24 and she was 16.
Listen: Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin talks to RTÉ Arena
Then, at the very beginning of the novel, she gets a call from her father, who tells her that the Archdiocese of Dublin is kicking off the process to have Ferdia made a Catholic saint. He invites Jay to come home for a mass celebrating the news and, in the months that follow, the stark divides that she's established in her life start to break down. She finally has to grapple with her grief for Ferdia, her relationship with her parents, and her feelings about the Catholic Church.
When I began writing, I knew that the question of Ireland's social and religious transformation could be of interest to a broad audience. Living in the UK for the last twelve years, I've often found myself in conversations about our national progressive glow up, with spikes of interest around the marriage equality referendum, the repeal referendum, and that Christmas when literally everyone was gifted a copy of Small Things Like These.
Looking at my own experience, the first eighteen years of my life were completely infused with religious belief.
But in approaching the novel, I wasn't primarily interested in the headlines or statistics. Rather, the question that animated my writing was: how did it feel to live through this period of Irish history? How did it feel being a young queer person, seeing the country changing around you but still not trusting that it was safe to come out? How did it feel, as a Catholic parent, to continue bringing your children to mass through the successive waves of scandal? How did it feel to watch those children grow up and drift away from the faith? If the family is (officially) the fundamental unit of Irish society, how have our families adapted to the ruptures of the last three decades, and at what emotional cost?
For the purposes of the novel, I decided to push these questions to something of an extreme, through the device of Ferdia's cause for canonisation. But at the same time, I've tried to explore my themes with as much nuance and understanding as possible. Ordinary Saints doesn't shy away from the failures and crimes of the Catholic Church, but it recognises that these questions of faith, family and identity are complicated.
Looking at my own experience, the first eighteen years of my life were completely infused with religious belief. That brought some darkness, inevitably, in the form of guilt, shame, fear, and anger at the terrible abuses perpetrated by the Church. But at the same time, there are parts of it that I miss: the music, the familiar rhythm of the prayers, seeing almost everyone I knew at mass on Sunday mornings.
In Ordinary Saints, I've tried to capture this ambivalence, which I suspect many people brought up in religious homes feel. You can at once hate that way that religion constricted your life, and also miss its moral clarity and comfort, or struggle to find another system of meaning to take its place.
So ultimately, Ordinary Saints is story driven by questions rather than answers. On one level, it's about an obscure theological process. But much more than that, it's about a complicated family battling with grief and change – and trying to hold on to love through it all.
