Latest news with #NiamhNiMhaoileoin
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.
RTÉ News
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin
We present an extract from Ordinary Saints, the debut novel by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin. Brought up in a devout household in Ireland, Jay is now living in London with her girlfriend, determined to live day to day and not think too much about either the future or the past. But when she learns that her beloved older brother, who died in a terrible accident, may be made into a Catholic saint, she realises she must at last confront her family, her childhood, and herself... The first time I kissed a girl my brother died. I was sixteen and at a party in a big house overlooking Dublin Bay. My brother was in Rome, studying to be a priest. For most of the evening, though it was only Saint Patrick's Day and still cold, I sat alone on an elaborate wooden patio chair, getting drunk and staring at the glimmer of the coastline, following the slow ferry's lights as it pulled out to sea. 'Do you mind if I sit with you? I've brought supplies.' It's Aisling, a friend of a friend from the Irish-speaking school across town. 'Oh yeah, yeah, of course.' The words gurgle a little in my throat so I gesture at the other chair in the set to confirm. Aisling, carrying a bottle of wine in one hand and a small basket of garlic bread in the other, lowers herself down. 'It's so sweaty inside,' she says. 'And loud. I was looking for somewhere I could rest for a minute and then I saw you out here.' 'I'm being pretty anti-social,' I say, which is true. I realised too late that I was in no mood for Síofra's house party, with all its shouting and spilling drinks and close, hot breath. My humour was all right when I left home in the afternoon but around seven or half seven something shifted. I felt myself hating every new face that came through the crystal-paned front door. Later, after I find out, I try to track my movements against my brother's, to figure out if this abrupt emotional unmooring is a tele-pathic reaction to his energy being suddenly and improbably sucked from the universe. But the timings don't match up. I'm just in a mood. 'Fair enough,' Aisling says, pouring wine into the mug I've balanced on the arm of the chair. Lady Golfers Have More Drive, it reads in cartoon letters. She looks up and smiles, her teeth so straight and white that they catch the moonlight. 'Though I have been wondering why you never talk to me.' I don't know what to say. It's never occurred to me to speak to Aisling, who's a year and a half older than me and half a foot taller, plays football for Dublin and looks like a warrior queen from ancient mythology: big joints, pale skin, a tumble of reddish hair. I smile back. 'I'm shy.' Inside, there's the sudden sound of girls screaming and we both turn, thinking something's happened. But then someone turns the music up and they all shriek again, the noise breaking through the patio doors and spilling across the lawn. 'Jesus Christ,' murmurs Aisling. 'If I never hear "Mr Brightside" again in my life it'll be too soon.' I laugh, a bit too loud. 'I hate them too.' 'Yeah? What kind of music do you like?' The garlic bread becomes very dry in my mouth and I have to force a scratchy swallow. 'Oh, a bit of everything.' Aisling raises a fair, almost invisible eyebrow. 'Cool. I love everything too.' 'Nick Cave!' I nearly shout, though I've only heard one of his songs – last week, on the radio in my father's car – and can't even remember what it was called. 'Hmm, OK. That is cool.' Relief floods my body, so powerful that I think it might knock me out. 'It's a bit rubbish though, isn't it, liking different music to everyone else? It kind of makes you feel like an outsider.' I say nothing. We watch two trains curve silently along the bay, their lights getting closer and closer, looking like they might crash. 'You know, any time I see a train, even if I know it's only going to Bray or whatever, it makes me jealous of the people on it. That they're going somewhere and I'm not.' It sounds stupid as I say it, but Aisling doesn't laugh. Instead, she reaches out and takes my hand, dreamily, sympathetically, like other girls sometimes do when they talk. The world begins spinning faster then, the stars and the darkness of the sea and the sounds of the party all swirling together, catching fire and extinguishing from one moment to the next so that the two small islands of our patio chairs are the only points of stillness in the universe and our hands the bridge between them. I wonder if this is what a mystical experience would feel like. I wonder if I'm being called by God. We stay there talking in the darkness for hours until Aisling says that she's sorry but she absolutely has to go to the bathroom. 'But please don't leave,' she says and I shake my head, even though I'm freezing, my lips so numb they're slurring over words. Once she's gone, the silence and intensity of my feelings are too much to cope with. I look at my phone. Four missed calls, two from each of my parents. My chest tightens. How do they know? A text appears from my father: Please call us back as soon as you see this. We urgently need to speak to you.
