13-07-2025
Meet The Last Irish Missionaries - making the new RTÉ documentary
Author and broadcaster, Dearbhail McDonald, introduces the documentary series, The Last Irish Missionaries, that she co-hosts with Bryan Dobson and which charts the unique evolution of the Irish missionary movement.
MY earliest memory of Ireland's missionaries is the annual Trócaire Lenten campaign, a rite of passage where every mantlepiece was adorned with those cardboard cartons inviting us to think about those less fortunate than ourselves.
I think, too, of the beautiful grounds and lake at Dromantine, outside of my home town of Newry. With a history dating back to the Middle Ages, the estate was bought in 1926 by the Cork based Society of African Missions (SMA). Such was the surge in men and women from Ireland joining the missions after independence – when the country was experiencing a fusion of nationalism and Catholicism that seems alien to us now - the SMA bought the large, storied property to prepare their students for missionary work in Africa. Some 600 men trained there between 1926 and 1972, yet only a small handful of returned missionaries live in retirement now at Dromantine, a retreat house and conference centre that is also home to a stunning collection of African art and carvings.
From early medieval times, Ireland's missionaries – our fabled "saints and scholars" – took their faith, heritage and our history to every corner of the world. And their evolution spans not just a large arc of time, but also spans a huge arc of influence in terms of the evolution of their roles, from religious colonialists to heroic acts of self-sacrifice and philanthropy; as educators and healthcare providers; from a flourishing of Irish "soft power" to, inevitably, tawdry scandals of abuse and cover-up that have plagued the institutional church at home and overseas.
Today, the Irish missionary chapter is drawing to a close, resulting in my co-host Bryan Dobson and I setting out on a remarkable journey across the world to explore why so many Irish priests, nuns, lay people and others felt called to spread the Gospel to the farthest reaches of the world.
The stories we heard and the people we encountered, in Ireland, Africa and Asia – in truth, we could have travelled to every continent - are as diverse as they are extraordinary.
I think of my encounter in the slums of Nairobi with Sr Mary Killeen, an Irish nun who has transformed Kenya's Mukuru slums after nearly 50 years of building state-of-the-art schools that have educated 170,000 children, as well as building training and healthcare facilities in a city where over 60pc of the population live in these distressing informal settlements.
Walking through the slums with Sr Mary, known as the "Mother of Mukuru" is an almost impossible task as she is mobbed by residents who continually thank her.
Fearless and ferociously witty, the now 80 year old retains a relentlessness in improving the conditions for millions of slum dwellers and has no qualms about taking on patriarchies or hierarchies – civil or clerical.
Sr Mary has no intention of retiring, but her age does beg the question: who, if anyone, will pick up the baton, when, eventually, she decides her race is run?
Today, there are only about 450 Irish missionaries still scattered around the world: by the end of this decade, that number is likely to fall below 200.
The global reach of Ireland's missionaries is poignantly reflected in St Austin's Cemetery, also in Nairobi, the final resting place for many Irish missionaries, including lay missionary Edel Quinn, who many, today, wish to see canonised.
St Austin's had once hosted the remains of Bishop Joseph Shanahan, widely regarded as the founder of the modern Irish missionary movement, credited with a mass evangelisation campaign in Nigeria – now home to the world's largest Catholic seminary.
Bishop Shanahan died in 1943 was buried at St Austin's. But his remains were exhumed in 1995 and reinterred at Onitsha cathedral in the heart of the land of the lgbos, Southern Nigeria. Bishop Shanahan also founded the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary (MSHR), an Irish female order who recently celebrated a century of sending religious sisters to Brazil, Cameroon, Ethiopia, England, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, USA, and Zambia.
At their convent-cum-retirement home in Dublin, I met a remarkable group of MSHR sisters, most in their 90s, who had endured war, famine, post-traumatic stress and countless other hardships.
They included Sr Grainne Fitzpatrick, a fellow County Down native, now 92, who I first saw in the haunting Radharc documentary, Night Flight to Uli.
Filmed in Biafra at the height of the Nigerian civil war, the film sparked not just an awareness of the war, but also fomented, in the Irish population, an enduring flame of consciousness and conscience about the developing world. This, in turn, has led to Ireland's reputation, globally, as a world leader in overseas aid and development, as the missionaries, over time, handed over the baton to international aid organisations and NGO's, including Concern and Trócaire.
What was striking about Sr Grainne, and her colleagues all over the world, is the strength of their conviction and a willingness, if allowed, to do it all over again.
The Irish Missionary movement is not without its complexities. Was this our form of colonialism? Undoubtedly, in the early evangelist waves, it was.
Did the Mission fields we furrowed become dumping grounds for some known and suspected abusers? Were children and others, including religious sisters, abused overseas?
The answer, sadly, is yes.
But Ireland's missionaries are not 'the other'. Their history is our history.
Today, there are only about 450 Irish missionaries still scattered around the world: by the end of this decade, that number is likely to fall below 200.
Will we miss them when they are gone? And is their story really over?
Long starved of vocations in Ireland, our elder missionaries are now recruiting new vocations overseas to carry on their work there, but also to re-evangelise the Irish at home. As one missionary chapter closes, another may just be beginning.
