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Irish Times
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Author Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin: ‘I'll always be angry about the history of the church in Ireland'
Tell us about your debut novel, Ordinary Saints. Ordinary Saints is about Jay, a queer Irish woman living in London who finds out that her dead older brother, Ferdia, may become a Catholic saint. It was inspired by Carlo Acutis, the 'first millennial saint', who was due to be canonised two days after your book came out. Tell us about him and the whole canonisation process. Carlo Acutis was an Italian teenager who died of leukaemia in 2006. He was a very religious child who, among other acts of devotion, built a website cataloguing eucharistic miracles. After reading his story, I became obsessed with the arcane and bizarre process of canonisation. To this day, it involves exhumation, healing miracles, intrusive investigations of candidates' lives and often, as in Carlo's case, the public display of physical remains. Having grown up gay in Ireland, how do you feel about the Catholic Church? I'll always be angry about the history of the church in Ireland – the violence inflicted on children, women, queer people and many others. But there is a distinction between the institution and the faithful. In some ways, Ordinary Saints is a celebration of the power of faith, even as it criticises the church. How did the novel evolve over its various drafts? On my first draft, I got to 20,000 words then threw them out and started again. At the beginning of that second draft I found my narrator Jay's voice. From there, the story flowed pretty steadily. READ MORE The late Pope Francis crops up in Ordinary Saints. What did you make of him? I feel quite ambivalent. In many ways, Francis gave us a glimpse of what the Catholic Church could be – a church of the poor and the marginalised. But there always seemed to be a limit to his progressive ambition, particularly when it came to women's and LGBTQ+ rights. Do you have a favourite saint? I've always had a grá for Bríd. I appreciate her healthy disregard for authority. You were shortlisted for the Women's Prize Trust Discoveries Prize in 2022, and won the inaugural PFD Queer Fiction Prize. Did this help? Hugely. Writing a debut novel is daunting and the prizes gave me a confidence boost. They also helped me find a community of other writers. You won The Irish Times debating championship in 2010, as did your father, Eoin, in 1983. Sally Rooney made her name as a debater, too. Does it feed into your writing? Debating is great training for any career that requires compelling communication. But the whole point is to win arguments and take definitive positions. Fiction is different; it's about asking open questions and embracing uncertainty. You live in Edinburgh now. Does the distance help you write about home? I started Ordinary Saints during lockdown, when I couldn't travel home. That time gave me both a new clarity about Ireland and a sense of longing, both of which influenced the book. Like fellow author Michael Collins, you are an endurance athlete. Are there similarities with writing? Definitely. Writing and distance running are both about showing up every day and putting in the effort, whether you feel like it or not. Which projects are you working on? I've got a new novel in the works, but I'm very cagey about my works in progress! Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage? I've lived in three great literary cities, where you can go on mini-pilgrimages all the time. I remember spontaneously changing my cycle route home one evening because I wanted to see the street in London where Beckett's Murphy lived. What is the best writing advice you have heard? Focus on the sentence, the one you're writing right now. Who do you admire the most? The people of Palestine for their courage, humanity and perseverance. You are the supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish? I'd establish the necessary legal framework for trans people to live freely and in peace. Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend? Stag Dance by Torrey Peters; Conclave; and Critics at Large, a cultural podcast from the New Yorker. Which public event affected you most? I was only eight when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, but I vividly remember going to the Stations of the Cross that day and feeling the intensity of all the adults' emotions. What is the most beautiful book that you own? My great-grandfather, Séamas Ó Maoileoin, wrote a book called B'Fhiú an Braon Fola , published by Sairséal agus Dill, about his involvement in the War of Independence. I have a beautiful copy, which includes maps drawn by my grandfather, Ailbe. The best and worst things about where you live? Like Dublin, Edinburgh combines all the cultural attractions of the city with easy access to the mountains and the sea. But it is very dark for a lot of the year. What is your favourite quotation? The final passage of Middlemarch. '... the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.' Who is your favourite fictional character? Sally Seton in Mrs Dalloway . A book to make me laugh? Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel. Hilarious, as well as insightful and moving. A book that might move me to tears? I most recently cried reading Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell. Ordinary Saints is published by Manilla Press
RTÉ News
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
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.
