November 2014

1st ~ Rev. Peter Ward C.S.Sr. (90), Clonard Monastery, Belfast.

2nd ~ Very Rev. John O’Donovan P.E., St. Petersburg, (Clearwater) Florida & Whitegate, Co. Clare.

2nd ~ Rev. Nicholas Walsh S.P.S., Coniker, Tullamore & Kiltegan, Nigeria & Diocese of Kerry.

2nd ~ Very Rev. Donal Gillespie (85), Omagh, Tyrone & Archdiocese of Cardiff (Wexford 1959).

3rd ~ Rev. Roger Rafter S.C.A., Thurles, Co. Tipperary & Rathdowney, Co. Laois.

4th ~ Very Rev. Thomas Flynn P.E., Killoe, Co. Longford (Ardagh & Clonmacnoise) (1963).

5th ~ Very Rev. William Waldron (88), Tucson /Phoenix, Arizona / Claremorris (All Hallows 1950).

5th ~ Rev. Brian Gallagher S.S.C. (87) (1952), Bristol, Rhode Island,U.S.A. & Derryhassen Downings, Co. Donegal.

6th ~ Right Rev. Monsignor John J. McMahon (91) (1948), Diocese of Phoenix, Arizona / Mullamagavan/Carrickvilla, Co. Cavan.

7th ~ Rev. Noel Ryan S.P.S., Brazil & Birr, Co. Offaly. 

5th ~ Rev. Desmond McCaffrey O.C.D (87) (1953), Clarendon Street, Dublin.

14th ~ Venerable Archdeacon Michael G.O’Brien P.E., Carrigaline, Cork (Cork & Ross) (1958).

17th ~ Rev. Sean McTiernan S.P.S., Tillahurk, Carrigallen, Co. Leitrim / Nigeria / Iceland.

19th ~ +Most Rev. Jeremiah Coffey (81), Bishop Emeritus of Sale (1958), Australia & Cork.

19th ~ Rev. Patrick Cullen S.P.S., (1952), Kenya & U.S.A..

20th ~ Rev. Maurice Crean M.H.M. (76), Rathgar, Dublin. 

20th ~ Rev. Gabriel (John) McCarthy O.C.S.O. (89) (1955), Mt. St. Joseph Abbey, Roscrea, Co. Tipperary & Lisgoold, Co. Cork.

22nd ~ Very Rev. Adrian J. Brinn P.E., Diocese of San Bernardino, California (1968) & Limerick.

22nd ~ Rev. Pat O’Lenny (75) (1956) (Diocese of La Crosse), USAF Base, Menwith Hill, Diocese of Leeds & Belfast in San Antonio Texas.

23rd ~ Very Rev. John Horan (94), Archdiocese of Seattle (1946) & Duagh, Co. Kerry.

24th ~ Rev. Richard M. O’Donovan O.M.I. (82), Colwyn Bay, Wales & Kanturk, Co. Cork.

29th ~ Very Rev. Brendan Fleming P.E. (87), Portland Archdiocese, Oregon / Lisnaskea (1952).

 December

1st ~ Rev. Eddie Lynch C.S.Sr. (85) (1966), Esker, Athenry & Limerick.

2nd ~ Right Rev. Dom Peter Garvey O.C.S.O. (77) (1963), Abbot Emeritus of Bolton (2006-2012), Roscrea & Ballyhard, Co. Galway. 

4th ~ Very Rev. Finian Conway, Christchurch, New Zealand & Raharney, Co. Westmeath.

7th ~ Rev. Liam Hayes S.V.D. (64) (1985), Obera, Argentina & Cappamore, Co. Limerick.

7th ~ Rev. Anthony M. O’Connell O.S.M. (72) (1967), Cork, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 

8th ~ Right Rev. Dom Colmcille (Tom) O’Toole O.C.S.O. (89) (1952), Abbot Emeritus of Roscrea (1964-2000) & Camcon, Co. Mayo

8th ~ Very Rev. Francis A. Mc Corry P.E., Belfast (Down & Connor) (1949).

9th ~ Very Rev. Francis Cox (89), Diocese of Wichita (1950) & Tarmonbarry, Co. Longford.

10th ~ Very Rev. Canon Gerard Ferguson P.E., Rockcorry, Monaghan (Clogher) (1952).

11th ~ Rev. Thomas Garvey (88), former C.C., Glinsk & Archdiocese of Hobart (Elphin) (1950).

11th ~ Rev. Patrick Alan Fitzpatrick O.Carm., Gort Mhuire, Balinteer, Dublin 15 & Kildare. 

13th ~ Rev. Jim Fitzpatrick (former C.C., Castlebridge), Ferns, Co. Wexford (Ferns) (1994). 

17th ~ Rev. Harry McCarney S.P.S. (86) (1959), Clones, Co. Monaghan & Nigeria & Kenya.

21st ~ Very Rev. Dave Maher, Ballinlough, Cork, Galway & Dover (Southwark Archdiocese).

23rd ~ Rev. Mark Kavanagh S.S.C. (89) (1950), Dublin & The Philippines.

27th ~ Right Rev. Monsignor Patrick Fox (88), Crossmolina, Ballina, Co. Mayo & San Diego (Wexford 1952).

31st ~ Rev. John Dominick Geary C.S.Sp. (84) (1960), Canada & Dundalk & Limerick.

31st ~ Rev. Denis McCarthy O.M.I., Ashford, Co. Limerick (1950) & Springvale, Australia.

 January 2015

2nd ~ Very Rev. James Feehan P.E. Boherlahan, Thurles, Co. Tipperary (Cashel & Emly) (1950).

3rd ~ Rev. Kevin O’Mahoney M.Afr. (85), Dublin & Adigrat, Ethiopia, Manchester & Araglin, Cork.

5th ~ Very Rev. Harry Quigley P.E. (82) (All Hallows 1957), Diocese of Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia & Colehill, Longford.

6th ~ Very Rev. Jack Ralph (S.P.S. 1955), P.E., Gulfport, Mississippi (Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston) in Diocese of Biloxi & Newtownforbes, Longford & Nigeria.

9th ~ Very Rev. Ned Flynn P.E. (99), Ballinabrackey, Co. Meath (Meath) (1941).

9th ~ Rev. Daniel Baragry S.S.C., Tipperary (1954), Limerick & The Philippines.

11th ~ Rev. Matt Curran O.S.A., Ballyboden, Dublin.

14th ~ Right Rev. Monsignor John J. Madigan P.E., Archdiocese of Washington & Askeaton & Ballycormack, Shanagolden, Co. Limerick. 

19th ~ Rev. Michael Buckley C.S.Sp. (83) (1959), Moyvane, Co. Kerry.

22nd ~ Rev. Simon Clyne C.M., Clara, Co. Offaly & St Patrick’s, Drumcondra.

22nd ~ Very Rev. Patrick (Paddy) Carmody P.E., Celbridge & Straffan & Kerry (Dublin).

23rd ~ Rev. Michael McCarthy C.S.Sp. (94) (1948) Kenmare, Co. Kerry, Nigeria, U.S.A. & Sierra Leone.

23rd ~ Very Rev. James Moore P.E., Tolerton, Carlow (Kildare & Leighlin) (1963).

24th ~ Very Rev. Canon Patrick Breen, Gotoon, Kilmallock & Abergele, Diocese of Menevia, Wales.

26th ~ Very Rev. Canon Patrick Quealy P.E., Coolagh, Abbeyside & Dungarvan (Waterford & Lismore) (1946).

27th ~ Very Rev. John Cribbon P.P. (77), Walton-le-Dale, Preston & Kilkelly, Co. Mayo (After a fall).

27th ~ Rev. Neil O’Driscoll S.J. (81), Dublin, Wexford & Kilkenny.

27th ~ Rev. Tim Connolly C.S.Sp., (86), Charleville (1955), Nigeria, Canada & Zambia.

31st ~ Rev. Edbert O’Dea O.F.M., Kilcornan, Clarinbridge, Co. Galway & Kokstad, South Africa.

 February

1st ~ Rev. Patrick Aidan Heelan S.J. (89), Dublin & Fordham, Stonybrook & Georgetown, U.S.A.

5th ~ Rev. Lawrence Hannan S.M., Fiji & The Ward, Dublin.

6th ~ Very Rev. Patrick Kehoe P.E., Abbeyleix (Kildare & Leighlin).

7th ~ Very Rev. Canon Thomas Breen P.E. (84), Dromore, Co. Tyrone (Clogher) (1956).

13th ~ Very Rev. Dr. Padraic McGowan P.P., Ballymahon, Co. Westmeath (Ardagh & Clonmacnoise) (1965).

13th ~ Rev. Thomas Butler S.M., Chanel College, Coolock & Kinsealy, Dublin.

15th ~ Rev. Fred Hanson S.S.C., (99), Belfast, Japan & Korea.

15th ~ Right Rev. Monsignor Vincent McCabe P.E., (1946), Carrigallen, Co. Leitrim & California.

17th ~ Very Rev. Vincent (Thomas) Kelly P.E., Palmerston & Pontoon & Westport, Co. Mayo (Dublin).

17th ~ Rev. John O’Keeffe O.F.M., St. John Lateran Basilica, Rome & Cork.

19th ~ Very Rev. Michael Collins P.P. (69), Quin, Clooney & Maghera & formerly Roscrea (Killaloe) (1983). 

22nd ~ Rev. Christopher Madden, Palmerstown & Inchicore (Dublin).

23rd ~ Rev. John A. (Jackie) Madden O.Carm., Terenure College, Dublin 6W.

23rd ~ Rev. John McLaughlin S.P.S. (68) (1971), Stirling, Scotland & Belfast, Zambia & Chicago & Nigeria.

24th ~ Rev. Kevin William Cassidy (80), Sun City, Arizona & Arva, Co. Cavan (1960) Diocese of Madison, U.SA.

 March

2nd ~ Rev. Jack Casey S.M.A., Killeens, Cork.

3rd ~ Very Rev. James Hannon, Clare Road, Drumcondra, Dublin (Dublin).

 4th ~ Rev. Paul Merne S.V.D., Oaxaca, Mexico & Carlow.

7th ~ Very Rev. Joseph Allan Brennan (93), Whitby, North Yorkshire & Enfield, Co. Meath (former Holy Ghost 1950) (Middlesborough 1963).

9th ~ Rev. Paddy Cleary C.S.Sp., (80), Borrisokeane (1961), Nigeria & Sierra Leone & St Mary’s, Rathmines.

9th ~ Very Rev. Gerry Cleary P.E. (80), Gulf Port, Mississippi & Ballygar (Carlow 1961 for Natchez-Jackson).

11th ~ Very Rev. Martin Smullen (63) (1982) (Archdiocese of New Orleans) & Dublin.

13th ~ Very Rev. Roger Robbins, Clara, Offaly & Diocese of San Antonio, Texas.

16th ~ Very Rev. Sean Fay P.E., Rathmoylan & Enfield, Co. Meath (Meath) (1958).

19th ~Rev. Bertie Egan C.S.Sp. (82) (1959), Dublin, Zanzibar, England, U.S.A., Alaska & Australia.

21st ~ Rev. Colmcille (Colm) McKeating S.S.C. (75) (1962), Belfast & The Philippines.

21st ~ Very Rev. Xavier Lovett, Diocese of Seattle, Washington & Kilmoley, Co. Kerry.

25th ~ Rev. James Hartford O.M.I. (80), Inchicore, Dublin.

25th ~ Right Rev. Monsignor Tommy Maher P.E., Mullinavat, Kilkenny (Ossory) (1948). 

26th ~ Rev. Brendan Shiel (90), Carlton, Brisbane, Australia & Kilkelly, Co. Mayo (1949 Wexford).

27th ~ Very Rev. Sean Clancy P.E., Briton Ferry & Mumbles, Wales & Ballinascarthy, Cork

29th ~ Very Rev. Canon John Sinnott P.P. (77), Ballindaggin, Co. Wexford (Ferns) (Wexford 1963).

30th ~ Right Rev. Monsignor Joe Jennings (97), Ahascragh, Co. Galway & Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama (1943 Carlow).

31st ~ Very Rev. Michael Lane P.E., Glenroe/Ballyorgan, Co. Clare & Clonlara (Limerick). 

 April

4th ~ Rev. Dermot Forkin former C.S.Sp. in Australia.

5th ~ Rev. Mattie Grogan C.S.Sp. (84), Bansha, Co. Tipperary & Canada.

8th ~ Very Rev. Canon Gerard Timoney P.E. , Irvinestown, Co. Fermanagh (Clogher) (1947).

12th ~ Rev. Eugene Bree S.P.S., (81) (1961), Rathoneragh, Cummeen, Sligo & Nigeria.

13th ~ Rev. Art (Eamonn) McCoy O.F.M., Multyfarnham, Co. Westmeath & Waterford.

14th ~ Fintan Muldoon, former Priest of St Petersburg Diocese(1969), Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.A. & Kinvara, Co. Clare.

15th ~ Rev. Tommy Swords O.M.I., Bloemfontein, South Africa.

16th ~ Rev. Frank Mulloy C.S.Sp. (90) , Westport, Nigeria & U.S.A.

20th ~ Rev. Denis Bartley S.S.C. (88)(1951), Pallasgreen, Limerick, The Philppines, Peru & U.S.A.

23rd ~ Very Rev. Canon Vincent Hodnett P.P. (69), The Lough & Rosscarberry, Cork (Cork & Ross) (Rome 1970).

25th ~ Very Rev. Jerry O’Mahony P.E. (80), Otley, Leeds Diocese & Millstreet, Co. Cork (All Hallows 1958).

26th ~ Rev. Flannan Daffy C.S.Sr., Esker & The Philippines.

26th ~ Rev. Denis O’Sullvan, Diocese of Shrewsbury (1990) & Grenagh, Co. Cork.

26th ~ Rev. Matthias Murphy C.S.Sp. (82), Bandon, Tralee Nigeria & The Gambia.

 May

2nd ~ Very Rev. Peter Cronin (98), Archdiocese of Liverpool & Derinagree, Co. Cork (Wexford 1945).

2nd ~ Very Rev. Daniel C. Cronin P.E. (87), Diocese of Norwich (1963) in Windham, Connecticut & Gneeveguilla, Rathmore, Co. Kerry (Ordained M.H.M. 1955 – served in Borneo until 1963).

2nd ~ Rev. Jeremiah Joseph O’Mahony (80), P.E., Sowerby Bridge & Castleford, Heckmondwike & Addingham & Millstreet, Co. Cork. 

4th ~ Rev. Roger McGorty M.H.M. (85), Enniskillen & Fassagh, Beleek, Co. Fermanagh (1956), Borneo, Freshford, Kilkenny, Kenya & Belfast. 

5th ~ Very Rev. Brendan McAleer P.E., Aghaderg & Warrenpoint, Co. Down (Dromore).

6th ~ Rev. Patrick Towe O.M.I., Birmingham, Dublin & Bloemfontein, South Africa.

9th ~ Rev. Joseph Steele C.S.Sp. (71), Kimmage & Belfast.

10th ~ Rev. Brian Browne O.F.M. (Cap.) (98), Ard Mhuire, Creeslough, Co. Donegal.

11th ~ Rev. John Cranley O.M.I., Freemantle, Australia (Ordained Piltown, Kilkenny 1958).

11th ~ Very Rev. Patrick Ryan P.E., Eadestown, Naas, Co. Kildare (Dublin). 

14th ~ Very Rev. Stephen Carey, Diocese of Camden, New Jersey (Kilkenny 1962) & Templetuohy.

14th ~ Rev. Patrick Ruane S.V.D. (87), Brazil (1963) & Annaghill, Kiltimagh, Co. Mayo.

15th ~ Rev. Gerard Jennings, Ballybay, Co. Monaghan & Stranorlar, Co. Donegal (Clogher).

15th ~ Rev. Vincent Kavanagh C.S.Sr., Arklow, Co. Wicklow & Esker, Athenry, Co. Galway.

15th ~ Very Rev. Martin Ruane (76), Menlough, Co. Galway (Carlow 1963) & Jackson, Mississippi.

15th ~ Very Rev. Oliver O’Doherty P.E., Dunkerrin, Co. Offaly (Killaloe) (1964).

16th ~ Very Rev. Seamus McCormack, P.P. (74 (1964 All Hallows), Clacton-on-Sea, Essex (Brentwood Diocese) & Daingean, Offaly.

18th ~ Rev. William (Bill) Kennedy S.M.A. (89), Nigeria & Dublin & Cork.

19th ~ Rev. Peter Coffey S.D.B., Crumlin & Geashill, Offaly.

19th ~ Very Rev. Hugh Crowe P.E., Archdiocese of Los Angeles (1958 Carlow) & Ballygar, Co. Galway.

20th ~ Very Rev. Peter Connolly P.P. (60), Clonbur/Cornamona, Galway (Tuam) (1978). 

21st ~ Very Rev. Hugh Ernan Dolan (85), Longford (Carlow 1957), Mobile, Alabama & Florida. 

22nd ~ Very Rev. Sean Melody P.E., The Folly & Ballycarbry, Waterford (Waterford & Lismore) (1971).

22nd ~ Right Rev. MonsignorMorgan Rowsome (72) Wexford 1964), San Antonio, Texas & Tomsollagh, Ferns, Wexford.

25th ~ Very Rev. James Carigan P.E., Clough-Ballacolla, Co. Laois (Ossory) (1945).

26th ~ Rev. Raymond Comiskey L.C., Yucaton, Mexico & Whitehall, Dublin 9.

27th ~ Very Rev. Liam Ryan P.E., Cappamore, Co. Limerick (Cashel & Emly) (1960).

31st Very Rev. John Fingleton P.E., Baltinglass & Graiguecullen (Kildare & Leighlin) (1956).

31st ~ Rev. Larry Finnegan S.V.D., Drumcondra, Dublin, Kenya & West Indies.

 June

1st ~ Very Rev. Thomas Noel Barry P.P. (58), Lambhill, Glasgow & Cork (1981).  

2nd ~ +Most Rev. Thomas Flynn, Bishop Emeritus of Achonry (1977-2007 (Achonry) (1956).

2nd ~ Very Rev. Andrew Johnston P.E., Foxford, Co. Mayo (Diocese of Achonry) (1964).

4th ~ Rev. Patrick McGovern S.M.A. (85), Bawnboy, Cavan (former C.C. Cootehall) & Nigeria.

5th ~ Rev. Martin Pius Ryan C.S.Sr. (63) (1979), Cooleen, Templederry, Tipperary & Marianella & The Phillipines.

6th ~ Very Rev. Walter Forde P.P. (71), Castlebridge, Wexford (Diocese of Ferns) (1968).

8th ~ Rev. Martin Ryan C.S.Sr. (1979), Marianella, The Philippines, Templederry, Co. Tipperary.

9th ~ Rev. Colm Campbell P.E. (79), Belfast & formerly New York (Down & Connor) (1960).

10th ~ Rev. Ray Reidy S.P.S. (78) (1963), Thurles & Nigeria & Kenya & Ireland.

11th ~ Very Rev. Gerry McArdle P.E. (74)(1972), Nechells, Birmingham & Burren, Warrenpoint, Co. Down. 

14th ~ Very Rev. Gerard Hughes P.E., Gidea Park, Romford, Essex & Terenure, Dublin.

14th ~ Very Rev. Moling Lennon P.E., Naas & Two-Mile-House (Kildare & Leighlin) (1956).

15th ~ Rev. Bartholomew Hayes M.H.M. (90) (1950), Slievewadra & Ballyduff, Kerry, Freshford, Kilkenny, Uganda, Kenya & Dublin.

17th ~ Rev. Michael Clarke O.M.I. (87), Ardee, Co. Louth (1952) & Melbourne, Australia. 

18th ~ Very Rev. Canon John Naughton, Wimbleton Park, London & Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon.

18th ~ Very Rev. Canon Finbar Kelleher P.E., Ladysbridge & C.C. Ballindangan, Cork (Cloyne).

18th ~ Rev. Pat (Paddy) Meehan S.S.C. (89), Innishammon, Smithsboro, Monaghan & U.S.A. & The Phillipines (1949).

19th ~ Rev. Paul Fitzgerald (88) (1951) Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia.

23rd ~ Very Rev. Denis Keane P.E., Red Lode, Montana ~ Diocese of Great Fall-Billing & Craughwell, Co. Galway.

23rd ~ Rev. Raymond O’Donovan O.P., Newbridge College, Co. Kildare.

27th ~ Rev. Patrick Breen M.S.C., Carraig na bhFear, Cork & Wexford.

28th ~ Very Rev. Patrick Tarrant, Lombardstown, Cork & Centreville, Montana.

28th Right Rev. Monsignor Patrick O’Neill (99), Clonoe, Kingsisland, Co. Tyrone & San Diego (1945) (Diocese of Bismark, North Dakota & later San Diego). 

 July

2nd ~ Rev. Michael (Aloysius) Ryan O.Carm., Kildare.

2nd ~ Rev. Martin Collins C.S.Sp. (83), Dunmore, Nigeria, Paraguay & U.S.A.

3rd ~ Rev. Paudie Moloughney S.P.S., Littleton, Thurles, Brazil & Nigeria.

4th ~ Very Rev. William Corcoran (92), Newcastle, Thurles (1950), Diocese of Palmerston North/Wanganui, Wellington Archdiocese, New Zealand.

5th ~ Very Rev. Seamus Cox P.E. (86), Ballintubber, Co. Roscommon (Elphin) (1955).

5th ~ Very Rev. Michael O’Sullivan, Boherbe, Co. Cork & Weston Super Mare, England. 

7th ~ Very Rev. Denis Caddle, Honiton, Devon, England & Crumlin, Dublin.

9th ~ Very Rev. Tony Cahir P.E., Birr, Co. Offaly & Ennis (Killaloe) (1963 Rome).

13th ~ Very Rev. Edmond Whelan, Doon, Castleconnell, Co. Limerick & St Wilfred’s, Birmingham.

15th ~ Rev. Anthony Malone S.M., Chanel College, Coolock, Dublin.

15th ~ Rev. Finbarr (Gerard) Clancy S.J., Clongowes Wood College, Clane & Milltown & Dunlavin,

15th ~ Rev. Tom Mullen SSCC (64) (1975), Ardee, U.S.A., England.

16th ~ Rev. Michael Doyle C.S.Sp. (82) (1959), Cork, Nenagh, Australia, Papua New Guinea & Italy in Scarborough, Toronto, Canada.

16th ~ Very Rev. Patrick Canon Carey, St. Ethelbert’s, Slough & Ennis, Co. Clare.

18th ~ Rev. Conleth (Joseph) O’Hara C.P. (86) (1956), Highgate, London & Ballyholme, Bangor, Co. Down. 

19th ~ Right Rev. Monsignor Willie Cleary P.E., Tullamore & C.C. Mornington (Meath) (1959).

19th ~ Very Rev. John Brogan P.P., Kilskyre, Co. Meath (Meath) (Rome 1974).

19th ~ Very Rev. James Connaughton P.E., (90) (1950 Waterford) (Diocese of St Augustine), Florida & Williamstown, Co. Galway.

21st ~ Very Rev. Canon Denis McSweeney P.P., Flitwick, Northampton & Kanturk, Cork (All Hallows 1975).

25th ~ Very Rev. Denis Dwyer P.E. (84), Padiham, Burnley (Diocese of Salford) & Banemore, Listowel, Co. Kerry (Thurles 1957).

 August

4th ~ Very Rev. Pat Cotter P.E. (69), Tiernaglclohane, Cooraclare & Sixmilebridge (Killaloe) (1971).

7th ~ Rev. Noel (Athanasius) Winston O.F.M. (Cap.) (77) (1966), Ballinlough, Co. Roscommon & Port Elizabeth, South Africa & Dublin. 

9th ~ Venerable Archdeacon Macatan Brady P.E., Malahide (Dublin) (Rome 1941) & Enniskillen.

10th ~ Rev. Francis Lai King Leong Kom S.V.D. (76) (1973), Maynooth, Brazil, West Indies & South Africa.

11th ~ Very Rev. Canon Gerard McGreevy P.E., Magherarney, Smithboro, Monaghan (Clogher) (1954).

11th ~ Rev. John Joe (Jodie) King C.S.Sp., Granard, Co. Longford & Kimmage Manor, Dublin.

12th ~ Rev. Martin Crowe O.P., Ballybeg, Waterford & Gorey, Co. Wexford.

12th ~ Very Rev. Brendan Foley, Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux (1955), Louisiana & Nigeria & Knockananna, Co. Wicklow.

20th ~ Rev. Desmond Lancelot Edward Curran S.J. (89), (1964), Kyayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. 

22nd ~ Very Rev. Sean Sheils P.E., Diocese of Brentwood, Dalkey & Ennis, Co. Clare.

23rd ~ Rev. Brendan McDermott C.P. (84), Mount Argus, Dublin.

27th ~ Rev. Thomas Murphy O.M.I., Aragoinia, Brazil & Coolock, Dublin.

 September

2nd ~ Very Rev. George Lyons, Killenaule, Co. Tipperary & Reading, England (Diocese of Portmouth).

3rd ~ Rev. Sean Weldon S.P.S., Collinstown, Co. Westmeath & Nigeria & Kenya.

3rd ~ Very Rev. Patrick Francis Rice (66), Sparta, Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey & Tydavnet, Monaghan (1974).

3rd ~ Rev. Kieran Rice, Foxton, New Zealand & Ballyrafton, Dunmore, Kilkenny (Palmerston North) (1955).

4th ~ Very Rev. James A. (Eddie) Canon Randles P.E., Malahide, Dublin (Dublin) (1951).

5th ~ William (Bill) Carney (65), former priest of Archdiocese of Dublin (1974-1992).

6th ~ Rev. James Ryan O.F.M. (Cap.), Ard Mhuire, Creeslough, Co. Donegal.

6th ~ Rev. Noel (Fergus) O’Loan O.Carm., Gort Muire, Dublin 16 & Zimbabwe.

6th ~ Rev. Kevin Anthony Browne C.S.Sp., Tralee & Kimmage, Nigeria & Mauritius.

6th ~ Very Rev. Terence Boylan P.E. (75), Heswell, the Wirral, Liverpool & Garvagh, Co. Derry (Kilkenny 1963). 

9th ~ Rev. Gerard Gill M.S.F.S., Blanchardstown, Dublin & Kettering, England.

10th ~ Very Rev. Michael McEldowney P.E., Claudy, Co. Derry (Derry) (1962).

10th ~ Rev. Richard Callanan O.F.M., Rossnowlagh, Co. Donegal.

12th ~ Very Rev. John (Jackie) Finn P.E., Louth (Armagh) (1947).

15th ~ Rev. Michael Kiely S.C.A., Bruff, Limerick, Tanzania, England & Dublin.

17th ~ Very Rev. Edward Barry P.P., Aughrim, Co. Wicklow & Rosscarbery, Co. Cork (Dublin) (1954).

18th ~ Rev. Patrick Lyons, Connacht St. & Clonown, Athlone & Diocese of Westminster. 

20th ~ Rev. Desmond Quinn S.S.C., Ballina & the Philippines and England.

23rd ~ Rev. Thomas Nicholson M.S.C., Cape Town, South Africa & Killererin, Tuam. 

28th ~ Rev. Michael (Philip) Kelly O.S.A., New Ross, Co. Wexford & Ballyboden, Dublin.

 October

2nd ~ Very Rev. Joseph Garvey P.E., Curragha, Navan (Meath) (1961).

4th ~ Rev. Joseph Shiels S.S.C., The Philippines & Waterside, Derry.

5th ~ Very Rev. Richard Canon Higgins P.E., Maree, Labane, Knocknacarra, Glasgow (Galway) (Wexford 1966).

6th ~ Rev. Denis Green S.M. (95), Mount St. Mary’s, Milltown, Dublin 14.

7th ~ Rev. Savino Agnoli C.S.Sp. (83), Kimmage Manor, Dublin 12 & Italy, Nigeria & Ghana.

12th ~ Very Rev. Raymond J. Rafferty P.E., St. Paul’s, Cranston, Diocese of Providence & Greenore, Co. Louth.

12th ~ Very Rev. Dr. Gearoid O’Donnchadha, Fenit, Co. Kerry (Kerry) (1957). 

13th ~ Right Rev. Archdeacon Francis Donnelly P.E., Dundalk, Co. Louth (Arnagh) (1955).

16th ~ Rev. Ciaran O’Sabhaois O.C.S.O., Mt. St Joseph’s, Roscrea & Bessbrook, Co. Armagh.

17th ~ Rev. John Mulligan S.M., Dundalk, Co. Louth.

17th ~ Very Rev. Louis Breslan (92) Guilford & Australian Navy (Archdiocese of Sydey) (Carlow 1948).

21st ~ Rev. John (Gerard) Bresnan O.S.A., Ballyboden, Dublin.

21st ~ Very Rev. Canon Patrick Brennan P.E., Muckalee, Kilkenny (Ossory) (1955).

22nd ~ Rev. Denis Wilkinson M.C.C.J. (87) (1976), Comboni Missionary (Verona Fathers), Uganda & Kitchener, Canada & Tomacork, Carnew, Co. Wicklow.

22nd ~ Very Rev. Vivian (Gerard) Twohig P.E., Mullagh, Loughrea, Co. Galway (Clonfert) (1960).

23rd ~ Rev. Oliver C. Kennedy S.S.C., Loughrea, Co. Galway, Korea, Jamaica & U.S.A..

25th ~ Rev. Patrick (Paddy) Crowley S.S.C., Colomane, Bantry, Co. Cork ~ Japan, Australia, New Zealand & England.

27th ~ Rev. Hugh O’Sullivan S.D.B., London & Currans, Farranfore, Co. Kerry.

29th ~ Very Rev. Oliver J. Devine P.E., Mountnugent, Co. Cavan (formerly Brother Norbert, De La Salle), Delvin, Co. Westmeath (Meath) (1999).

31st ~ Rev. Seamus Cullen, Rush, Co. Dublin (Dublin).

31st ~ Right Rev Monsignor Denis O’Sullivan P.E., Clonakilty, Ballygurteen & Rossmore (Cork & Ross).

Renewing Catholic education was at the heart of a national conference held at Cistercian College, Roscrea on Friday. Some 200 delegates from all over the country – North and South – came together to share their hopes for a re-visioning of the heart of Catholic education.

The conference – marking the 50th anniversary of the Vatican II document on Christian education Gravissimum Educationis – was held against the backdrop of a number of challenges and attacks on Catholic schools and faith formation in both jurisdictions on the island.

There was clear energy in the room and a determination to articulate the values that infuse Catholic education in a more coherent fashion.

The Pope’s representative in Ireland, Archbishop Charles Brown paid tribute to all those who are defending the rights of parents to choose a Catholic education for their children, often in a hostile media environment.

He pointed out that Catholic schools in Ireland are acknowledged as amongst the best in the world and underlined the fact that many non-Catholic parents choose a Catholic school both for the high academic quality and the values that inspire the school community.

However, Archbishop Brown also warned that without a conscious effort to defend the ethos, a Catholic school runs the risk of descending in to “vague spiritualism”.

He paid tribute to Mary Immaculate College Professor of Theology Dr Eamonn Conway for his “spirited and convincing advocacy for Catholic education”.

Fr Aelred Magee, a monk of Mount St Joseph Abbey in Roscrea, gave an overview of Vatican II’s teaching on education in general, and Christian education in particular.

He said that while perennial truths do not change, the challenge for Catholic schools in the 21st Century is how these truths are applied today.

He said that schools cannot shrink from their responsibility for faith formation, pointing out that Vatican II taught that all Catholics are evangelisers by virtue of their baptism.

Relationship

In his remarks, Prof. Eamonn Conway reflected on Pope Francis’s relationship with young people. He expressed the view that the modern papacy had developed a special relationship with younger people and wondered aloud whether this was because the world needed a father figure and had identified one in the person of the Pontiff. He said that Pope Francis wants the world to discuss the “joy and importance of fatherhood” while not ignoring the fact that motherhood is often also in crisis in the modern world.

He said more consideration had to be given to the fact that 84% of primary school teachers are female and, therefore, it is rare for boys to meet male teachers.

Prof. Daire Keogh, President of St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra told the conference that Catholic schools had nothing to fear from diversity. In fact, he insisted that Church teaching backs the rights of all parents to choose an education for their children consistent with their values.

He called on the Church in Ireland to ensure that the process of divestment – whereby some local Catholic schools are made available to a non-religious patron body – be intensified and schools identified to provide for genuine choice. However, he also warned that there is too often a “simplistic narrative” around divestment.

Choice in education, he said, would facilitate the emergence of a healthy education system which would facilitate parental choice and the development of authentic Catholic schools.

He said that for such schools to be authentic, Catholics had to grow in their confidence in articulating the Faith and the values of Catholic education. While acknowledging that the Catholic sector is under considerable threat, he pointed out how this has historically always been the case.

Prof. Keogh warned that there is an onus on Boards of Management of Catholic schools to constantly ask themselves “what should our Catholic schools look like?”

He criticised an impoverished vision that saw religious imagery such as crucifixes as mere artefacts in a school rather than core elements of the faith of believers.

Prof. Keogh said the most successful schools are where the vision is clearly articulated. He cautioned the Church against wanting to hold on to schools for the sake of it, pointing out that the Church’s vision of education is never to be property managers, but guarantors of a vision.

Consultation

David Quinn of The Iona Institute challenged what he described as many of the myths around faith-based education.

He described the current consultation being carried out by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment on the future of education about religion as a “farce”. Mr Quinn pointed out that the Education about Religions and Beliefs (ERB) and Ethics programme essentially takes an agnostic approach to religion, which, he said, was incompatible with a Catholic school.

In his presentation to the conference, Mr Quinn outlined some of the common criticisms of faith-based schools and rejected allegations that they were not inclusive.

He said it suited the Government to have the current debate about school enrolment policies concentrate exclusively on religious grounds as this deflected from the fact that the State has failed to provide enough places at primary schools for children.

He insisted that where schools were over-subscribed – about 20% of schools – admissions policies had to be put in place. Mr Quinn also pointed out that where there is a first-come, first-served approach to enrolment this often discriminates against children from the Travelling Community and from immigrant backgrounds.

The conference was organised by Fr Aelred Magee and the deputy president of Cistercian College Niall McVeigh.

Catholic schools ‘need to find their voice’

Catholic schools in the Republic have a lot to learn from their counterparts in the North a leading educationalist has insisted.

Fr Niall Coll, a lecturer at St Mary’s University College in Belfast told the National Conference on Catholic Education that schools in the North are “more experienced in and comfortable talking about the distinctive character of faith-based education”.

He said that Catholic schools north of the border are “well-versed in the need to demonstrate that Catholic education can have no truck with sectarianism, that it offers a vison of education open to all who can value and appreciate its characteristic ethos”.

He also said that as the Republic moves towards a more pluralist model of education, it is important to realise that Catholic schools in the North “more than happily co-exist alongside state controlled, integrated and other types of schooling”.

He reiterated the point of many speakers that more thought needs to be given to ethos. “Many of us involved in Catholic education struggle to articulate what precisely constitutes the Catholic ethos in education, since ethos is, traditionally, more assumed and taken for granted than defined in Irish schools”.

Reflecting on the upcoming anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, Fr Coll pointed out that “we live in an Ireland which no longer needs Catholicism to underpin its sense of itself… In this new context Catholic schools often find themselves in the line of fire from the media, politicians and the academy.

“How, it is often asked, can there be a place for publically funded denominational schools in an ever more secularised, pluralist, secular, multi-religious republic?”

He warned that “faith communities can no longer take their schools for granted, but must try to put language on what precisely constitutes the distinctive ethos that they so value and wish to see continue, and also demonstrate to wider public opinion the added-value their schools bring to wider society.

“Catholic education needs to find its voice in the public square,” he said.

A number of students from one of Ireland’s leading teacher training colleges have taken a unique approach to teaching children about the environment. 

Papal documents aren’t usually the top choice resource for teachers, especially at primary school level, but Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environment has proven to be accessible for all ages.

That’s what a group of student teachers from Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College found when they took on the challenge of explaining Laudato Si’ to a class of 12-year-olds at Corbally’s Scoil Íde.

Third year student teacher David Walsh told The Irish Catholic he “thoroughly enjoyed” the experience and would “absolutely” consider using other Church documents in classes in the future as a result.

“I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I loved working with the class and engaging with the students’ questions and thoughts on the issue.

“I will absolutely be using Church documents when teaching in the future,” he said, adding that encyclicals such as Laudato Si’ are ideal resources for teachers as they deal with “contemporary” issues.

“It’s about the now and the future rather than the past. It’s about going forward,” he said.

David also said he was “surprised” at the level of engagement from students with the Pope’s encyclical and the subject of the environment. 

“I was surprised that even though they were so young they had great insights and were able to express them perfectly,” he said, adding that Pope Francis is a person young people “respect”.

Passionate

“This Pope is concerned about the youth and the environment. I think he’s a friendly and approachable Pope, set on doing the right thing. 

“Pope Francis is a person the children respect and take heed of. They could clearly see that care of the environment is an issue he is passionate about and so understood the need for action,” he said.

Head of Theology at Mary Immaculate Prof. Eamonn Conway said “it’s important for students to engage with papal documents and see that they impact on real life”.

He said Laudato Si’ in particular “touches on so many aspects” of the primary school curriculum, which “allows for the Christian perspective on a whole range of issues to be brought to life in the classroom”. 

In preparation for the teaching initiative, which took place over a two week period and included four hours of direct teaching, the student teachers read Laudato Si’ in depth and derived four main themes to focus on.

The themes selected, which would form the basis of four distinct lessons, were:

• Pollution.
• World hunger.
• Climate change.
• Endangered animals.

David explained that the group decided to open up the first lesson by showing the class a number of key quotes from Laudato Si’ without revealing the Pope as the author.

The student teachers selected quotes such as: “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

And: “Humanity has disappointed God’s expectations.”

David said the students were “shocked” to eventually discover that they were direct quotes from the Pontiff. 

“These quotes really shocked and surprised the children as they are not things you would generally hear in today’s world. The children were shocked furthermore to discover that the Pope said these things himself. It’s not stuff you would expect a Pope to say,” David said.

Addressing the second topic, world hunger, the student teachers got the class to play the ‘biscuit game’, which involves dividing the class into different groups of different sizes representative of the continents.

They then gave each ‘continent’ a different number of biscuits which were representative of how much food that continent would have.

David explained that this “reflected the Pope’s message in the encyclical about the inequality of resources in our world”.

“That was something they really enjoyed. It was their favourite. They had really great questions afterwards. They could really reflect critically on the whole situation,” he said.

On the third issue, climate change, the student teachers focused on “how we are not caring properly for our common home”.

They also developed a ‘word cloud’ comprising of the most popular words within Laudato Si’: world, human and God.

“We took from that the message that God created the world for humans and so it is up to humans to take care of the world for God,” David said.

Opportunity

Teachers also provided the class with the opportunity to ‘suggest’ to Pope Francis by means of a suggestion box ideas about how they could prevent climate change, with the children coming up with ideas such as walking or cycling to school rather than taking a lift in a car.

On the last topic, endangered animals, the student teachers played another game based on an old favourite – musical chairs – in an attempt to impress upon the children the issue of melting ice caps in the North Pole.

The children, pretending to be polar bears, had to walk around the class and jump onto pieces of newspaper, representing ice, laid on the floor whenever the music stopped. 

As the game progressed, teachers removed more and more pieces of newspaper. 

Concluding their teaching initiative, the student teachers invited the class to write a prayer on a sheet of paper in the shape of a leaf and attach it to their hand-crafted ‘Laudato Si’ tree’. 

David said there were a “great variety” of prayers, with the children asking God to assist them “in their efforts to make the world a better place”.

Overall, David said the experience led him and the class to discover “the link between religion and nature”.

Prof. Conway said he was “hugely impressed” with the caliber of the student teachers involved in the project.

He raised in particular their “ability to translate the at times difficult language of the encyclical into perfectly sensible concepts for sixth class pupils”.

Prof. Conway said he was equally impressed with the children being taught.

“I was amazed at how quickly the pupils grasped the seriousness of the issues being discussed and how quickly they could relate to real issues and ask tough questions about the problem of evil and suffering in the world.

“I would definitely encourage other schools to look to do something similar,” he said.

Fr Martin Magill

Dear Pope Francis,

Recently I was part of a small group who met to discuss your encyclical which turned out to be a fascinating and stimulating event and the catalyst for this letter. I am now writing to ask you to encourage parishes and Catholic institutions throughout the world to implement at least some of the recommendations of Laudato Si’ as I am concerned it may not have the impact you clearly would like it to have (something I also strongly desire). I am not sure that many Catholics throughout the world are aware of it, have read it let alone changing their lifestyles as a consequence of reading it. I also believe Catholics don’t appreciate how reading, reflecting and implementing its message is an opportunity to live the Catholic faith in this current time of crisis, change and opportunity. 

At the recent discussion group on it, one woman talked about her concern that there would be study groups on it but that these would affect little change in behaviour. It strikes me that in many dioceses throughout the world, study groups are not even taking place. Whilst of course “without vision there the people perish” and Laudato Si’ outlines the contours of an ecologically embedded and attuned vision of care for self, community and our common home, visions alone will not constitute “ecological conversion”.

In Laudato Si’, you emphasised the importance of education in environmental responsibility which you said: “can encourage ways of acting which significantly affect the world around us, such as avoiding the use of plastic and paper, reducing water consumption, separating refuse, cooking only what can reasonably be consumed, showing care for other living beings, using public transport or car-pooling, planting trees, turning off unnecessary lights, or any number of other practices” (211).

Before reading Laudato Si’ I had picked up from the media your criticism of governments and how power is used in the world; I knew you had referred to the bailing out of banks deemed “too big to fail” and of course your concern for the poor who were not accorded the same status in public policy. 

In fact, when I read it, I was moved by how central to the encyclical is the link between our failure to care for our “common home” and our failure to address the urgent needs of the poor. 

You remind us at different times in the encyclical that the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor are the same and how it is always the poor who suffer most from our failure to care for our common home. I had not realised however you had challenged so strongly people of faith on our lack of concern for environmental damage to our common home: “Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions” (14). I had not realised you stressed the essential nature of creation care: “Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience” (217). 

The line that struck me most was: “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God” (8). Having read your encyclical, I now believe it is a wakeup call for people throughout the world. I had to read it for myself to recognise this. Your call for an “ecological conversion” is an injunction and invitation to partake in what theologian Thomas Berry has called the ‘Great Work’ of healing the Earth which is at one and the same time a recuperative and redemptive movement towards healing divisions, inequalities and blighted human relations within the global human family.

Recently, you asked every Catholic parish in Europe to receive and welcome refugees and that galvanised us. In my home diocese of Down and Connor, we now have in place a coordinating committee of key personnel to ensure your wishes are carried out and we have been preparing for the first people to arrive. 

It would seem logical therefore for you to ask every Catholic parish and institution throughout the world to put in place practical measures to implement Laudato Si’ and its worthy ideas and principles. You have given us the theory, you have given numerous practical examples of what we can do but now we need to get down to the implementation. Imagine the difference if every Catholic parish and institution throughout our “common home” began to do even a few of the things you suggested. 

An important and inspiring contribution Laudato Si’ makes here is that it offers an important corrective to the sometimes well-meaning, sometimes arrogant technological imperative response to the cry of the Earth – namely that more, bigger and better technology will solve our problems. But, as I read the encyclical, you suggest another response – what if an essential and Christian response is (which is not denying the role of technology) not to do something more, but thoughtfully to reduce, remove and reflect on our impact on our common home.  That is to do less not more.

Pope Francis, as we approach this major global conference on the environment in Paris I now appreciate how timely Laudato Si’ happens to be. You call us to a new global solidarity and action; it occurs to me not least in the light of recent tragic events how important that call has turned out to be. I would hope the attention this conference will generate might be a catalyst for people to read, study and implement Laudato Si’. We need people to access and read it. I am aware there are and have been some efforts made to encourage people to read your encyclical. 

The Irish Catholic newspaper produced a study guide based on the “see, judge, act” approach.  Drumalis, the Cross and Passion Retreat Centre in Co. Antrim has organised a number of retreats based on it and another retreat coming up in the New Year. The discussion group I referred to earlier was organised by Prof. John Barry from Queen’s University in Belfast and the Catholic Chaplaincy in the same university has copies of Laudato Si’ on sale.

Pope Francis, like your name sake St Francis, you clearly have a love for our “common home”, you have given leadership at world level at a strategic time on this issue – speak out again now and ask us to practice what you preach. 

In short, your message is powerful and prophetic, encourage us to read, study and implement Laudato Si’ in our dioceses, our parishes, our schools and places of learning.

Laudato Si’ has to become a ‘call to action’, based on its inspiring vision and thoughtful diagnosis of the malaise in, on and with the world. 

Our common home is being destroyed, defiled and degraded, partly wilfully and in the interests and to the benefit of a minority of the human family, partly out of ignorance, as this degradation is sequestered and occluded from the everyday perception of people simply getting on with living. 

In the literal sense of the term, Laudato Si’ is apocalyptic in the sense of ‘lifting the veil’, opening up the opportunity that in the appreciation of crisis lies redemption, recovery, growth and change. 

Hence I read Laudato Si’ as a spiritual call to action, for spiritual and practical change as responses to climate change as it were – a necessary and courageous recognition of the reality of the current human condition and the Earth. 

Given the tremendous changes required to repair and heal the damage we have wrought to our common home, a necessary result of the ‘ecological conversion’ we and our home so badly need will be viewed (somewhat fearfully) by many (especially those of us who live in the minority world, the high energy, high consumerist, highly polluting societies of the industrialised world). 

But as can be discerned in the wisdom of Laudato Si’, the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world. Just the end of the world as we currently know it, and the start of something different, something better, a world in which humanity lives in harmony with one another and our common home, a respectful, reverential and gracious ‘re-inhabiting’ of the Earth, a wise stewardship over that which we have not created yet upon which we are utterly dependent. 

In this ‘ecological conversion’ we can discern a paradigm shift in human attitudes to our common home: it is not the Earth that was made for us, our species alone (here we can see the error or sin of an arrogant human-centeredness). 

Rather it is the opposite: the gift and responsibility of our species is to care for the Earth: we were in part made for this purpose.

At the discussion group I attended, a ‘collapsed Catholic’ (his own words) concluded with some lines from one of the prayers you included at the end of your encyclical and the following quotation from T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding. 

Assuring you of my daily prayer for your ministry.  

“We shall not cease from exploration 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time.”

Yours in Jesus Christ

Martin J Magill 

Parish Priest, 

Sacred Heart Parish, Belfast.

The holy year, which has been called by Pope Francis, will begin on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 2015 and will conclude on November 20, 2016, the feast of Christ the King.

In Misericordiae Vultus (The Face of Mercy), the papal bull which outlines the overall spirit and intentions for the Jubilee, Pope Francis said the year is “dedicated to living out in our daily lives the mercy” which God “constantly extends to all of us”.

An informal survey conducted by The Irish Catholic has revealed many of the Irish dioceses have plans to fully embrace the year ahead. 

Fr Martin Hayes, administrator of the cathedral in Thurles, Co. Tipperary is on the diocesan committee in the Archdiocese of Cashel & Emly which is organising a number of events for the Year of Mercy.

“We will begin with the cathedral in accordance with Pope Francis who said he would like each cathedral to open a holy door. Last weekend we sealed the door with a brief ceremony and it will be reopened on December 13. 

“We also plan to place a temporary door at different points such as at Our Lady’s Altar, the baptismal font and the crib, where we will have designated pieces of scripture.

“On a diocesan level we also hope to host events at various locations such as Holy Cross Abbey and other pilgrimage places,” he said.

Bicentenary

In the Diocese of Down & Connor, St Patrick’s Church on Donegall Street in Belfast has been nominated to host the holy door, because the church is celebrating its bicentenary. It will also be possible to go through the holy door online and take a virtual tour through the diocesan website. 

After Christmas the diocese will host a Day of Mercy whereby the last Friday of each month will see a special celebration in parishes and a special emphasis will be placed on the Sacrament of Reconciliation throughout the year.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for the Church in this holy year to reflect on the merciful heart of God and what that means in terms of reaching out to people in need, and also for us as a local church and diocese to reflect upon the mercy of God and how we become instruments of that mercy to people in parishes. We hope it will be a wonderful celebration for different groups in our diocese,” said diocesan spokesperson, Fr Eddie McGee.

The diocesan liturgy committee in Ossory are organising a number of events throughout the Year of Mercy. “On December 13 we will have Mass in St Mary’s Cathedral led by Bishop Seamus Freeman with  the priests and people of the diocese, including a choir made up of singers from the 42 parishes,” said committee chairperson, Fr Richard Scriven. “One of the cathedral doors is being prepared at the moment to be the holy door. It is being painted a different colour to make it obvious that is a different entry point.

“We are looking at having formal celebrations throughout the year in different parts of diocese, maybe visiting some of more ancient monastic sites and we hope Confession will be a central part of the year.”

A holy door will be opened in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Carlow on December 13, which will be followed by officially openings of holy doors in Christian sites in the Diocese of Kildare & Leighlin throughout the year, with parishioners being encouraged to make a pilgrimage to each site.

“We will also have a ‘Mountain of Mercy’ in Lent where will we ask people to bring stones as symbols of mercy and leave them on the Mountain of Mercy. At the Chrism Mass parishes will be encouraged to bring a representative stone to the cathedral mountain,” said Fr John Cummins Adm. 

“The Year of Mercy is a great opportunity for people to engage with faith in a new way and you don’t know who will be touched by it and find it a great source of faith. It is an opportunity for showing mercy in acts and deeds and reaching out to those in need. We want to say to people to come with your burdens and receive God’s mercy and forgiveness, but also go out and show Christ’s compassion and be the mercy of God for people.”

In the Diocese of Waterford & Lismore a procession from the Dominican Church to the Cathedral of the Most Holy Trinity in Waterford will be held on Sunday, December 13, entering by the holy door. A holy door will also be opened in St Peter’s & Paul’s, Clonmel and St Mary’s Church, Dungarvan on the same day. The diocese will also have a “renewed emphasis on the Sacrament of Reconciliation” according to spokesperson, Fr Liam Power, including 24 Hours for the Lord – “eight hours of Confessions to be held on December 19 in Waterford cathedral, St Mary’s Clonmel and St Mary’s Dungarvan with a team of confessors available non-stop from 12noon to 8pm”.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has invited all priests and parishioners in the Dublin diocese to participate in what he has described as a “pilgrimage of Mercy” which will be celebrated in many different ways in the diocese throughout the Extraordinary Jubilee Year. 

In preparation, the Diocesan Advent Service on November 28 will have as its theme, ‘Preparing to meet Jesus – the face of Mercy’ and takes place in the Church of Our Lady of Mercy in Artane; the liturgy on the day will be prepared by full time chaplain students of Mater Dei/DCU and the music will be led the Dublin Diocesan Music group.

Parishioners are being offered the opportunity to display a sticker of the logo of the Year of Mercy on a door or window in their homes. “This is to allow people to show that their home is a place where all who enter will meet the face of mercy and compassion – inviting people to open their own doors of mercy and to invite others to cross the threshold,” a spokesperson said.

In the Diocese of Achonry, one of the inner doors at the Cathedral of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Nathy, Ballaghaderreen will be dedicated as a holy door on December 13.

The diocese is also planning a weekend of mercy in March 2016, with every parish having 24 hours of adoration and Confession during that time.

Diocesan Communications Officer Fr Vincent Sherlock said there are also tentative plans to hold an event specifically for young people towards the end of next year and confirmed that the Year of Mercy icon would be in a prominent place in every church with the prayer for the special year recited at every Mass.

He said some parishes were also exploring the idea of a ‘prayer wall’ on their individual websites allowing people to submit prayer requests, inviting others to prayer for their intentions. 

In Cork and Ross, Diocesan Secretary Fr Tom Deenihan told this newspaper that the diocese has chosen St Francis’ Church in Cork’s city centre as the location for its holy door.

“It was chosen not just for accessibility but because it’s a church where Confessions are available all day by the friars. It’s a popular Confession church in Cork so it was chosen for that reason,” he said, adding that further plans for the year are still unfolding.

In Limerick, Diocesan Secretary Fr Paul Finnerty confirmed that a holy door would be officially opened at the Cathedral of St John the Baptist on the morning of Tuesday, December 8 at 10am Mass.

Fr Finnerty said Limerick was in a “unique position” in that the Year of Mercy coincides with the diocesan synod there.

“We are in a unique situation in that we are engaging with people around the synod. We have a series of events for the whole year but they need to be coordinated with the synod,” Fr Finnerty said, listing plans such as a diocesan pilgrimage to Rome in September and a diocesan pilgrim walk from Mount Saint Alphonsus to the cathedral in April.

He said Bishop Brendan Leahy had appointed his predecessor Bishop Donal Murray to chair a Year of Mercy committee, made up of priests and representatives from all aspects of life within the diocese, to establish ideas and come up with a schedule of events for the year. 

Community

In Killaloe, Diocesan Communications Officer Fr Brendan Quinlivan told this newspaper that there will be two holy doors in the diocese. One will be stationed in the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Ennis, while another will be located at the Cistercian Monastery in Roscrea.

Fr Quinlivan said the idea behind the second holy door was to tie in conclusion of the Year for Consecrated Life with the Year of Mercy, encouraging people to visit a religious community in the diocese.

Another point of focus for clergy the diocese throughout the Year of Mercy is the visitation of prisoners, Fr Quinlivan said, noting that this particular focus arose from Pope Francis’ request for practical acts of mercy to take place through the year.

“We are largely a rural diocese so we mightn’t have as big a prison population as some more urban centres but I think it’s important to make a conscious effort this year with the help of the chaplains in the different prisons to strengthen our links and make contact with those who are in prison,” he said.

Fr Quinlivan told this newspaper that “there is a lot of enthusiasm” among the clergy of the diocese for the Year of Mercy. 

“They see it above all things as an opportunity to renew our understanding and commitment to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Many priests would feel that the whole catechesis and connection with reconciliation mightn’t be as strong as we would like it to be. Clergy see the year as an opportunity to renew that and give it a new impetus,” he said. 

In Clonfert, Communications Officer Fr Cathal Geraghty confirmed the diocese’s holy door would be in place at St Brendan’s Cathedral in Loughrea.

Fr Geraghty also said that Emmanuel House of Providence would be designated as a place of pilgrimage within the diocese for the duration of the Year of Mercy, adding that the council of priests were considering other events for the rest of the year.

“There will also be a push on the Sacrament of Reconciliation. That is something that the bishop will be suggesting in his communications about the year of mercy, encouraging people to the Sacrament of Reconciliation,” he said.

In the Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois, the Administrator of recently restored St Mel’s Cathedral, Fr Thomas Healy, said he was “struggling to understand” the concept of the holy door.

“Here we are after spending five years building up doors now we are having to break one down! It’s hard to convey the concept,” he said jokingly.

Longford’s iconic cathedral, which was almost entirely destroyed by a devastating fire in 2009, was finally reopened to worshippers last Christmas after a five-year, €30million restoration project.

Fr Healy confirmed there would be a holy door nominated at St Mel’s, while the diocese would be “placing an emphasis on mercy” in its initiatives through the year. 

“On the one hand that will mean Confession and Reconciliation and on the other hand we’re conscious of the call to visit the sick, to care for the prisoners and to be conscious of the poor. It’s about mercy in a broad sense. We will try to ensure the theme of mercy dominates the year ahead,” he said.

Fr Healy said the holy door at St Mel’s will be formally opened on December 13 and “will lead towards a confessional area to put an emphasis on God’s mercy”.

On the third Sunday of advent the Year of Mercy in the Diocese of Elphin will officially begin with the opening by Bishop Kevin Doran of a special holy door in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Sligo Town.

During the year, each parish of the diocese will be invited to travel for a special day pilgrimage to various shrines in the Sligo area culminating with a crossing of the “threshold of mercy” at the cathedral. 

On each Saturday during Lent in each of the six deanery towns of the diocese the priests of that area will come together to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation throughout the day. 

There are also plans at an initial stage of development to reach out practically to those on the margins in an effort to embody the mercy of God to those most in need physically, spiritually and emotionally.

There will also be an extensive series of events throughout the year, at various places in the diocese, which will invite various sectors of the community to contemplate the theme of mercy.

In Killala, Bishop John Fleming, will open the holy door at St Muredach’s Cathedral, Ballina, on Sunday, December 13 at 11am.

In advance of this the bishop intends to publish a Pastoral Letter to the priests and people of the diocese on the subject of the Year of Mercy.

The diocese also hopes to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the cathedral and all the churches of the diocese on the fourth Sunday of Lent 2016.

In the Diocese of Derry the holy door will be located at St Eugene’s Cathedral. A mercy space is envisaged in the cathedral comprising of a holy door, two confessional boxes and small chapel of mercy. 

In the Diocese of Clogher, Fr Patrick McGinn, Administrator of St Macartan’s Cathedral, Monaghan said plans for the Year of Mercy were in the pipeline now that a committee was in place and that an official opening ceremony for the holy door in the cathedral will be held on December 13.

In Meath, Fr Padraig McMahon, Administrator of the Cathedral of Christ the King in Mullingar, said the plan for the diocese throughout the year was to have extra Confessions.

“There’ll be a little bit of extra attention and focus on mercy, and more options should encourage people to come forward for Confession,” he said.

Bishop Ray Browne will be opening the holy door in St Mary’s Cathedral, Killarney in the Diocese of Kerry.

Similarly, Archbishop Eamon Martin will be opening the holy door in St Peter’s in Drogheda followed by another in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh.

Assigned times

On Saturday, December 12 a holy door will be officially opened at the 6pm vigil Mass in St Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh by Bishop William Crean of the Diocese of Cloyne. “We will open a holy door in a side chapel which has not been opened since it was closed for the jubilee year in 2000,” said Fr John McCarthy Adm. 

“The whole side chapel has been designated as a Shrine of Mercy so people can enter at assigned times during the week. We have also chosen three designs from three stained glass windows in the cathedral for banners and bookmarks featuring the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and the Good Shepherd. Some 25,000 bookmarks have been printed with the images and Gospel passages and they will be made available as banners for parish churches.”

A resource on ‘How to Go to Confession’ is also being made available to parishes and there will be a Year of Mercy workshop with Dr Edward Sri in February and a follow-up workshop in April.

Preparations are ongoing in the Dioceses of Dromore, Ferns, Galway, Raphoe and Tuam, and a representative was not contactable in the Diocese of Kilmore.

The Year of Mercy awaits. 

Some years ago a hard-bitten journalist colleague remarked that it is difficult to ask Fr Gerry Reynolds CSsR really tough questions because “the truth is that Gerry is a saint and in a sense he lives on a different planet from the rest of us”.

That person wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to remark on the saintly qualities of Fr Reynolds (78), native of Mungret, Co. Limerick and tireless worker for peace, reconciliation and Christian unity ever since he came to Clonard monastery off the Falls Road in west Belfast from the Redemptorist retreat in Athenry more than 30 years ago.

That was in 1983 and the place was a powder keg in the wake of the deaths of the 10 republican hunger strikers just two years before. 

Saintliness

One has heard others remark that Fr Reynolds has touched them in a profound way and that he radiates a certain saintliness.   

Pressed to comment on such observations Fr Gerry answers with the gentleness that appears to clothe him: “Those things happen. It’s not me, the Lord uses you and that’s it.”

He pauses before adding: “Every grace comes from the Spirit of God. You never know what you are doing or how you are touching people. That is true of every body, of every human being, of every baptised person.” 

Clonard is situated directly behind a ‘peace wall’ separating the Falls from the Protestant Shankill Road and is a stone’s throw from Bombay Street where the burning of Catholic homes in 1969 played a major part in the creation of the Provisional IRA.

It has been described as ‘the cradle of the peace process’ because it hosted the seminal January 11, 1988 meeting between John Hume and Gerry Adams which had been instigated by Fr Gerry’s friend and colleague in Clonard, Fr Alex Reid CSsR who died in November. 

The dialogue widened to include other SDLP and Sinn Féin leaders but ended without agreement in September 1988. 

Secret talks

However, secret talks between Hume and Adams resumed in Clonard in 1993 after a request from Fr Reid to the SDLP leader. 

This led ultimately to the December 1993 Joint Declaration by Albert Reynolds and John Major, the 1994 ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement. 

To maintain secrecy “John Hume would come in the front door and Gerry Adams the back”.

I met Fr Reynolds, one of 15 Redemptorists in Clonard, in Parlour 4 the modest drawing room where many of the Hume/Adams meetings took place and where Adams and Martin McGuinness secretly met Tony Blair’s chief of staff on the eve of IRA decommissioning.

He describes Hume/Adams as “a Redemptorist initiative” which had been instigated by Fr Reid. 

“As a congregation we have the freedom to take whatever initiative we believe is right for the sake of the Gospel.” 

At the time “no one was talking to Sinn Féin despite their electoral mandate and this dilemma had to be overcome or there would be no political progress”. 

“The Lord does not want us to be fighting full stop. It’s God’s will for us to live in peace and care for one another.”

Fr Reid

He points out that Fr Reid’s peace ministry had the full backing of the Provincial Fr Raphael Gallagher CSsR and that Fr Reid had written a mission statement for it at the request of Cardinal O Fiaich.

Fr Reynolds defends Gerry Adams’s decision to deny that he was in the IRA. 

 “He took that line that it was none of your business whether [he] was in the IRA or not. That is a legitimate mental reservation.”

 When it is  put to  him  that some would say Mr Adams is lying  he replied: “He’s entitled to that mental reservation, that he is not going to tell people that he doesn’t believe have any right to know.”

Fr Reynolds added that asking the Sinn Féin President and Louth TD if he was a member of the IRA or not “is such a stupid question” because the IRA was “a secret society and the raison d’etre of the secret society is that it is secret”.

Fr Reynolds said that the late Cardinal Cahal Daly’s refusal to meet Sinn Féin during the IRA campaign would have been supported “by a great proportion of the Catholic community” in the North notwithstanding the party’s electoral mandate. 

He says he wasn’t involved directly in the political negotiations but “primarily in an ecumenical contribution” beginning in 1990-91 which saw the first ever direct talks between Protestant clergy, including Fitzroy Presbyterian Rev. Ken Newell and Methodist Minister Rev. Sam Burch and the republican movement led by Gerry Adams. 

Even at this remove he is reluctant to name several of the other Protestant clergy involved.  

Later he and Mr Newell would jointly received the Pax Christi International Peace Award in recognition of the grassroots reconciliation fostered by Clonard Fitzroy Fellowship born in the hunger strike years of 1981.   

Headlines

In July 1994 Fr Reynolds and Fr Reid made headlines when they attended the funeral of UDA member and UDP chairman Raymond Smallwood who had served a prison sentence for the attempted murder of Bernadette McAliskey and had been murdered by the IRA. 

“He was committed to a peaceful way forward and Fr Alex and I had met him in UDA HQ not long before.” Fr Reynolds had also prayed at his wake. 

On recent events he says that the North’s five executive parties “must keep working at it” to find the agreement which had eluded US mediator Dr Richard Haass.

He declines to point the finger at unionists asking what is gained by “blaming people who cannot go with a particular resolution in conscience”.

“There is something in the human being that if you give me the justice I need I will give you the justice that you need.”

Passion

Alongside peace-making and normal pastoral duties Fr Reynolds’ abiding passion is working for Christian unity.  

Speaking ahead of this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity he is proud of his Catholic Unity Pilgrims initiative believed to be the only one of its kind in these islands if not in the world. 

Virtually every Sunday since November 1994 – when Fr Gerry spontaneously made the first trip to West Kirk Presbyterian Church across the peace line on the Shankill Road – around a dozen Clonard Catholics often including Gerry himself – visit a Shankill Protestant Church and attend worship. 

“We first meet in prayer in Clonard reciting together Fr Paul Couturier’s Prayer for Unity in Christ Jesus and then travel to a Presbyterian, Methodist or Church of Ireland congregation where we are publicly welcomed.

“We look for nothing in return, only that God be glorified by the witness of our love. Unity pilgrims are pastoral agents of the Holy Spirit mending the torn net of the Church.”

One suspects his prayer is that Protestants will one day make a similar journey to Clonard. Fr Gerry has also been instrumental in launching ‘In Joyful Hope: A New Step in Eucharistic Communion’ which involves four Eucharistic celebrations in different Catholic and Protestant Churches in the Belfast area over a year. 

It has the backing of various Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Church of Ireland and Methodist clergy and significantly Bishop Anthony Farquhar, chairman of the Bishops’ Conference’s Council for Ecumenism.

Celebration

Fr Gerry stresses: “We firmly believe the joy of being present at the Eucharistic worship of another Christian tradition is greater than the pain experienced by observing the Eucharistic discipline involved and not being able to share fully in the celebration. I was already aware of this through being present at Sunday worship as a Catholic Unity Pilgrim.”          

What has stood out most during his 53 years as a priest?

“The absolute conviction that the God of infinite goodness is with us.”

He then reaches for his favourite words from Dei Verbum, Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation: “The invisible God from the fullness of His love addresses human beings as His friends and moves among them to invite them and receive them into His company.”

For Gerry Reynolds that is what human life is all about.    

Ger Brennan doesn’t come across quite so formidable over a coffee. In fact, the former Dublin football star is as friendly off the pitch as he is fearsome on it. 

This reporter caught up with the two time All-Ireland senior medallist shortly after he announced his decision to retire from inter-county football in October. 

Such a decision for most talented sportsmen would mean heartache. But for the level-headed Brennan, who was really just in his footballing prime, it brought peace of mind.

“Since I have left I have felt great. When you make a decision sometimes you take control back and you get a bit of focus on your life. So from that point of view I’ve definitely made the right decision,” he told The Irish Catholic. 

“I felt like I had fulfilled what I had always wanted to and the desire and the hunger to want more wasn’t where it needed to be to succeed at inter-county level,” he said.

The St Vincent’s defender had been injury riddled for some time but wanted to “finish on a high and finish playing on the pitch”. 

“I tried my very best to get back,” he said, before ultimately coming to the decision to hang up his boots with the Dubs.

One would imagine it was difficult to watch from the side-lines as his former teammates hoisted the Sam Maguire yet again this year, but for Brennan “it was an affirmation” that he had made the right decision.

“When they lifted the cup there was a part of me that wished I was there but a part of me was very content that I had made the right choice. There is no disharmony in my decision in reality,” he said.

Club

Dublin’s loss is St Vincent’s gain, however, with Ger having recently returned to training with the Marino-based club.

He had missed the “feeling of belonging” that comes with playing as part of a team. “It’s great to have that sense of comradery again,” he said.

While GAA is high on his agenda, there’s much more to Ger Brennan than just football.

Having grown up in a “very supportive” family of nine children just off Dorset Street near Dublin’s city centre, Brennan attended the nearby Jesuit-run Belvedere College where he completed his Leaving Certificate and won a place on the school’s senior rugby team.

At the time, Ger’s local church was St Francis Xavier’s, popularly known as Gardiner Street Church on Upper Gardiner Street, near Mountjoy Square. 

He was a member of the church’s well-known Gospel Choir and was taught music by Br Tom Phelan SJ.

Unsure after departing Belvedere as to what he wanted to study at third level, Ger’s interest in theology was peaked after a conversation with two fellow volunteers during a trip to Columbia who had been studying as lay students at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

The conversation brought about “a moment of clarity” for Brennan who went on to complete a Degree in Theology and Irish at the Kildare based Pontifical College.

Ger then went on to teach in his alma mater, Belvedere, for a year before returning to Maynooth to undertake a Masters in Pastoral Theology in an effort to put his “faith into practice”.  

As part of the two-year-long MA programme, he completed a six-month pastoral placement in Ballymun, working and supporting priests in their daily duties and responsibilities. 

“It was about continually growing and developing as a person and learning about your faith through your experiences but also through the classroom,” he said.

By the time Brennan took up a role in youth ministry for the Eucharistic Congress which was held in Dublin in 2012, he was now becoming established within the Dublin senior team.

Given that much of the pastoral work he was involved in required evening and weekend work which very often clashed with his training, Ger decided to backtrack into teaching again. 

Trusteeship

He took up a position in St Kevin’s College, an all boy’s secondary school under the trusteeship of the Edmund Rice Schools Trust based in Finglas.

At St Kevin’s, Ger primarily worked with children from broken homes and with their own various challenges and struggles. 

“It gave me a great sense of gratitude for my own parents and my own family structure. It was a real privilege,” he said.

Ger taught Irish, religion and took some chaplaincy hours which he was well prepared for after completing three months clinical pastoral education at Dublin’s Mater Hospital. 

Working with sick patients was a “real eye opener” for Ger and gave him “a sense of perspective and gratitude” for his own life.

“When I went into St Kevin’s I felt very well prepared in terms of what I was facing,” he said.

The next chapter in Ger’s career began last month when he took up the position of GAA Development Executive at University College Dublin (UCD) after the post was left vacant by the sudden death of former Dublin selector Dave Billings.

“The big emphasis in the job is student welfare and the pastoral needs of students,” he said, noting that roughly 900 of the 25,000 student population at UCD are members of GAA clubs. 

“I have been entrusted now with their care and development and to hopefully form these young men and women into happier, more well-rounded individuals and when they leave UCD they will hopefully feel that their life has been enriched,” he said.

The role has other practicalities too of course, but the priority for Ger is to “empower and influence other people to reach their full potential”.  “That what floats my boat,” he said.

Faith

Turning once again to his faith, for Ger, it is “a personal relationship” with God who is “expressed in the life of Jesus Christ and those who follow him”. 

“That faith is enriched through an awareness of the Spirit in yourself and in other people. I believe strongly in that. It makes sense to me,” he said.

While Ger believes “strongly in the existence of something greater in the world”, he is also acutely aware of “the opposite, and that desire and pull to not follow your heart”.

Ger describes himself as a Catholic, however, doesn’t think “a person’s moral uprightness should be determined by their frequency at Mass”. 

“It should be determined by how they treat other people, themselves and the world around them. That’s the yard stick by which I measure myself,” he said.

Ger admits he goes through “phases” of attending Mass every day for weeks and then wouldn’t go for an extended period of time. 

Despite sometimes lengthy sojourns, however, Ger “always feels called back” to Mass.

Ger was a prominent voice on the ‘no’ side during the recent referendum on same-sex marriage and admits he “obviously still stands by” his decision.

At the beginning, he was “all for equality” as he puts it before he “began to read more and educate” himself about “what exactly the referendum was about”.

“To me there was more going on than just equality for gay couples. I felt the Government were emotionally hijacking people.

“I felt the Government were very clever in their wording and that got to me a bit because I felt there were a lot of questions that weren’t being answered,” he said.

Likening the wording of the so-called Marriage Equality Referendum to that of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, Ger said he felt the referendum was a “no brainer” to many people.

“Of course people are for the protection of life when phrased like that but there’s always something underneath,” he noted.

Ger was also highly critical of the ‘yes’ campaign during the marriage referendum for their treatment of people who were voting ‘no’ or those who hadn’t made their minds up.

“I felt there was an unfair treatment of people who were voting ‘no’ and those who weren’t sure whether they should vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ by the ‘yes’ campaign.

“There was a total inequality in terms of how they were treated. The ‘yes’ campaign were all for equality provided people felt the same way as them,” he said.

“To me I don’t feel the ‘no’ campaign went about their business in the same way. I felt in anything I did publically or privately I always listened to people’s views and while I wouldn’t always agree with them I listened and gave my views in a respective manner. 

“I think the vast majority involved in the yes campaign didn’t do that,” he said.

Wedding

On a lighter note, this Christmas will be a special one for Ger, his last at home with his parents, given his plans to wed his fiancée, Aisling, next December. 

“I absolutely love Christmas, it’s a great period. It’s a time to reflect on your faith and being grateful for that gift of faith and being extra kind and generous to other people,” he said.

As for the future, Ger is looking forward to some long awaited structure.

“There has been so much change in my life of the last few months in terms of football, my career and the engagement. I feel a bit dragged in every direction.”

He’s also excited at the prospect of developing his own faith and prayer life further.

“I’m looking forward to centring myself again over the next couple of months and getting back into a routine of prayer and church. I’m looking forward to improving my commitment to my faith,” he said.

“If I was as disciplined in my prayer as I was in my training I could be the Pope!”

Now wouldn’t that be something?

A new online project is helping people to know, live and share their faith.

iCatholic is the brainchild of the former Kildare and Leighlin chancellor Fr Bill Kemmy, whose goal is to “establish a trusted brand where people can go to access high quality content from the Church”.

Fr Kemmy, who is now a curate in Prosperous, said the idea for the project originated during his time as chancellor, when was responsible for the diocesan website kandle.ie.

“In thinking about the possibilities of the online work I began to think about the place that video had,” he told The Irish Catholic.

Unconvinced that YouTube was the most appropriate platform for what he had in mind, Fr Kemmy opted to develop his own delivery system akin to that of the RTÉ Player.

“I felt like that was a good model for the Irish church to follow. That way we would have our own player sand would be able to develop our own delivery system and there would be a lot of advantages that would flow from that,” he said.

iCatholic was in its infancy around the time of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 2012.

“What came from that was that iCatholic became the archive of the recordings that were done of the talks at the congress,” Fr Kemmy said.

Netflix

The advent of websites such as Netflix prompted the innovating priest to push iCatholic more in direction of becoming an “online library of on demand content”.

“The idea is that the Church should have its own version of that,” he said.

Noting that “in former times you would need a big TV station and aerial to place content on television”, Fr Kemmy said he “began to see that there was a way to bring content to people at the level that they are used to on television without actually having a TV station”.

“We have gone through an era of going from ordinary phones to smart phones and now we are moving from ordinary TV to smart TV. That opens up huge possibilities.

“It was easy to see that there was an opportunity there. The challenge was to gather both the delivery system and the content that would make use of that system,” he said.

That has come to fruition now with iCatholic’s weekly programme ‘A Question of Faith’ being aired on CatholicTV in the United States and online.

“It proves that we can produce high quality content that can work on both traditional television and on the internet,” Fr Kemmy said.

Presenter Wendy Grace explained that ‘A Question of Faith’ developed from an inconsistent feature on the website to a now established weekly half hour programme after iCatholic was approach by US based CatholicTV.

Since then, it has even had requests from further Catholic networks in Pittsburgh and New York.

Wendy, who presents the Morning Show on Spirit Radio, said she has been “enriched” by her experience working with iCatholic.

“I got involved because I think it’s very important to have some sort of digital medium to communicate stories that reflect our faith. I have to say I have been enriched by the people that I meet through working with iCatholic.

Hunger

“I think there is a real hunger out there from people to hear other people’s stories. There are very few places out there for people to get news and information connected to faith and value based issues that they can rely on,” she said, adding that she “would love to see the site used as a resource for solid digital faith based content but also for the catechetical side of things”.

The presenter also said she wanted to get “as many young people as possible” involved in projects like iCatholic. 

On the subject of youth, Fr Kemmy admits there is “perhaps a generational challenge” when working with new forms of media, “but like everything that’s new you have to invest time in sitting down and explaining it to people”.

Fr Kemmy said he was “very happy” that half the dioceses in Ireland have now have an iCatholic feed embedded on their websites.

“We’re beginning to develop the idea of network that iCatholic is helping to move content easily around at national level,” he said.

The project itself covers “very wide range” of issues, Fr Kemmy explained.

“We do lot on education and schools, on liturgy, on mission, on justice and on evangelisation.

“We don’t want to be pigeonholed as offering just one vision of the Church or just one type of spirituality. We are hoping that we are offering a fair representation of the Catholic Church which is very broad. We would see ourselves as very mainstream,” he said.

Partnership is one of the fundamental pillars of the project, Fr Kemmy insisted.

“We are trying to do this together. Something very good is possible if we work together,” he said, noting that an example of that is the growing partnership iCatholic enjoy with have with Kairos Communications in Maynooth.

“They have been very generous and have welcomed us and given us use of their studio at least one day a week which has really allowed us to develop. It has been a great help to us,” he said.

Partnerships

Fr Kemmy said he would like to develop further partnerships with dioceses, religious orders and Church agencies.

“We want to develop a common network. There is an open invitation for Church partners to come on board and to utilise the platform we are offering,” he said.

The iCatholic project is run on a shoe string.

Fr Kemmy said people “would be amazed to know the very modest budget that we have to create all we do and to reach a point that we have a weekly half hour programme on television in America. It’s remarkable,” he said, explaining that the project’s slim budget comes from “a small number of very generous donors who have helped us along with donations we get when we do work for our partners”.

On a budget of just €50,000 over the past year, iCatholic has created over 900 videos across 60 different channels and has reached over 360,000 people through their website, apps and social media platforms.

Ultimately, Fr Kemmy said, iCatholic is about “serving local needs”.

“You have to look after local needs in order to build a national network. The iCatholic player isn’t a closed system. It has been deliberately designed so that it can work on the platforms of our partners. You can decide what you want from iCatholic on your website. We are always trying to think of how we can serve the local need,” he said.

Fr Kemmy said the iCatholic team is now “actively working” on how best to get on peoples TV’s in Ireland.

“The goal for us is to establish a trusted brand where people can go to access high quality content from the Church.”

www.icatholic.ie

Fr Brendan Collins 

The story of Children in Crossfire has its roots in what began as a tragedy and ended as a triumph of the human spirit to overcome adversity. On Thursday, May 4, 1972 when a 10-year-old Richard Moore was on his way home from school, his life was to change forever. As he ran past an army lookout post located at the edge of his school’s playground, a British soldier fired a rubber bullet, blinding him for life. This is where his remarkable story of forgiveness and compassion begins.

Despite losing his sight in such a traumatic way, Richard returned to his old school, went onto university, successfully ran his own business, became an accomplished musician, is married with two children and leads a very active and fulfilling life. In 1996 he set up the charity Children in Crossfire.

Richard didn’t harbour any bitterness towards the soldier who shot him and always expressed his desire to meet him. In January 2006, Richard met Charles for the first time and the two men have become close friends.

Since 1996, Children in Crossfire has been improving the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable children caught in the crossfire of poverty, focusing on health and education programmes in Tanzania and Ethiopia that provide access to food, clean water and much-needed medical care. 

With the support of local people Children in Crossfire are able to:

Fund feeding programmes so that children are properly nourished to enable them to develop to their full potential. Without proper nutrition, children are susceptible to illness as well as being weaker and unable to perform well at school, damaging their future prospects as adults. 

Provide clean water for thousands of people, transforming their lives for generations to come. Having a clean water source also means that instead of spending three hours fetching water, children can spend this time in school, building a better future for themselves and their families. 50% of the population of Tanzania is under-nourished

Train teachers and provide learning kits for children. 75% of children in Tanzania have no access to pre-school. It has been shown that children who are able to attend pre-school have a much higher chance of staying at school and doing well, breaking the cycle of poverty.  

While much has been achieved as a result of the support of the local community, much more needs to be done. 

Sadly the terrible reality is that during Advent this year in Tanzania 12,000 children who are not yet five years old will die. It’s shocking and upsetting and almost entirely preventable. 

That’s why Children in Crossfire have to keep going, keep reaching out to the children most at risk and keep asking you to help. You can:

• Text Kids2 to 70660 to donate £5 (Northern Ireland only)
• Call our office on +44 (0) 28 7126 9898.
• Donate online
• www.childrenincrossfire.org or
• 2 St Joseph’s Avenue,
• Derry, BT48 6TH.

In the parish I am based in, we decided to support Children in Crossfire for its Advent appeal last year. For me, it was an opportunity for us to help those who live in the poorest situations in the world. Poverty is everywhere, sometimes it may not be evident. As a parish, we also work with local organisations, but as a Church we are called to reach out to all those in need. 

This is challenging, but with small steps we can all make a difference. Earlier this year, I was able to travel to Tanzania with Richard Moore and visit the projects we as a diocese were able to support with the generosity of our communities.

This was my first time in Africa. I was unsure as to what to expect and I suppose I based most of this on what the media tells us. My preconceptions were changed. I witnessed first-hand the communities who had made many changes because of the opportunities they had been given by Children in Crossfire. The model they work from is the sustainable approach, empowering communities to lift themselves out of poverty and provide a future for their children. This model gave me hope to see a future for people struggling in a difficult environment. We also visited communities who were looking for help and support and this was extremely challenging to see the evident need.

Witnessing the work of Children in Crossfire in Tanzania made me thankful for what we have. I had never seen extreme poverty like this; families with absolutely nothing, living in mud huts, sleeping on clay floors and not knowing where their next meal was coming from. I also developed a real appreciation for the excellent work being carried out by our local charity Children in Crossfire.

One family stands out for me; we met a lady and her children, she had benefited from the support of Children in Crossfire and was now running her own sustainable project of growing and selling produce. 

She showed us how she now had a new home, she was so proud because she was moving herself to a better life but this was still a difficult reality, they still had little to nothing. Erion Colombari showed me how, through the help of Children in Crossfire, vulnerable families like herself were benefiting. They were being given the support and tools to grow the vegetables to feed their children properly and to send their children to school; they were moving themselves forward.

The hope is there and we are part of creating the solution. Children in Crossfire’s annual Advent campaign is a fantastic way to support some of the world’s most vulnerable children. You can be part of providing a real future for families in Tanzania.

I am delighted and proud that our parish is supporting the Advent appeal this year and would urge you to do the same.

www.childrenincrossfire.org

They don’t make ‘em like Ollie Campbell any more. It’s a shame. He’s a real old-fashioned gentleman.

Ollie is arguably Ireland’s greatest ever fly-half, yet admittedly remains a “reluctant” interviewee. 

He claims to lack the “eloquence” necessary to do his 61 years justice but in truth he handles words with the same grace that he used to kick a ball.  

Born on Westland Row exactly 100 years after Oscar Wilde was born on the same street, Seamus Oliver Campbell was baptised in the nearby popular St Andrew’s Church before his family made the move across the Liffey to Malahide. 

Ollie described growing up in the “idyllic surroundings” of the leafy north Dublin suburb as a “blessing”. 

“Growing up in Malahide was like growing up in a playground. It was just such a wonderful place,” he told The Irish Catholic, listing off endless activities such as tennis, cricket, golf, fishing and swimming, that he took part in throughout his youth there. 

Blessing

Another “blessing” for Ollie was being sent to the Jesuit-run Belvedere College on Great Denmark Street. His brothers Martin, Stuart and Michael attended the same school, while his sister, Mona, went to Scoil Íosa, now known as Malahide Community School.

Belvedere’s Jesuit ethos left a “lasting impression” on Ollie.

“The Jesuits, whether you like it or not, really get in under your skin. Their influence really never leaves you. 

“They taught excellence and aspiration,” he said, and “that you are a winner once you try”. 

Listing well-known expressions associated with Jesuit education such as “give us the boy and we will give you back the man” as well as the order’s goal to create “men for others”, Ollie said they “all seem to hold true in real life”.

The other lasting impression the Jesuits seem to leave on their pupils, Ollie noted, was the “importance of having a social conscience”.

“Sometimes it’s even subconscious but the Jesuits give you a broader picture of the world and to always be on the lookout for those who might be less fortunate than you. 

“Either consciously or subconsciously that just seems to carry on in many Belvederians that I would know to this day,” he said.

Having mentioned mind and soul, body was the obvious missing link in Ollie’s evidently holistic education. Missing until he was “bitten” by the rugby “bug” that is, and “it’s been a love affair ever since”.

Starting out with Belvedere’s under nine’s team, Ollie took to the game “like a duck to water” and has “loved every single minute” of his involvement in the sport ever since. 

“They say rugby is not just a sport, it’s a way of life and that thankfully has been the way it has been for me,” he said.

En route to playing for the school’s senior team, the talented youngster was even coached by the well-known Fr Peter McVerry SJ, who has previously joked that 

Ollie “survived” a season under his tutelage. Nevertheless, Ollie regards the renowned homeless campaigner as a “living saint” who taught him a great deal. 

Attempting to explain the phenomenon that is schoolboy rugby, particularly in Leinster, Ollie defers to another famed Old Belvederian, rugby star and businessman, Sir Anthony O’Reilly. 

“He once said that the Leinster Schools Senior Cup final is one of the top ten blue-riband annual sporting events in the world. So that would be one perspective,” Ollie suggested.

Perspective

Another perspective Ollie offered was from Sir Anthony again, who said that despite losing by a last-minute try that resulted from an unfortunate intercepted pass, playing in a Leinster Schools Senior Cup final was a better experience than winning his first cap for Ireland against France on the same ground less than a year later.

“I think it’s hard to add to those two particular comments in terms of just how serious and important the Leinster Schools Senior Cup is to anybody who is lucky enough to take part in it,” Ollie said.

Ollie’s alma mater has now won the coveted cup 10 times in its 183-year history. This reporter was lucky enough to be part of the school’s most recent victory in 2008, but Ollie, of course, can do much better. He was involved in back-to-back titles in 1971 and again in ’72, while both his uncles Seamus and Michael captained the winning sides of ’38 and ’46 respectively.

“Our family have actually been involved in four of the 10 wins so it’s part of the tapestry of my life,” he said.

Rugby, as readers will be aware, didn’t stop for Ollie after he left school.

He describes a whirlwind six weeks that saw a string of good luck lead to his international debut against Australia in Lansdowne Road as if it were yesterday. 

Playing club rugby for Old Belvedere, Ollie got a call which would see him on the bench for a thrashing of his home province against old rivals Munster in Thomand Park in November 1975. 

The inevitable “wholesale changes” after such a thumping meant he would win his first cap for Leinster against Ulster the following month. 

The game, which happened to be the 100th anniversary of the first ever match between the two provinces, was a “dream”.

“It was one of those games where we didn’t put a foot wrong and everything went right.”

Having “against all expectations” won the match, Ollie was then selected as a reserve for a test against southern hemisphere giants Australia on their European tour early in the New Year of 1976. 

There was no stopping his purple patch then either. A tip on the shoulder at lunch the day before the big game by then coach Roly Meates would inform the unsuspecting Ollie that first choice out-half Barry McGann was unable to play and he would be starting in his stead.

“That was the good news,” Ollie said, noting that the team went on to lose the following day and he was subsequently dropped. 

“From the time I first started playing in Belvedere as an under nine to the time I retired 21 years later, the only team I was ever dropped from was that Irish team after my first Irish cap,” he recalled.

Surprisingly, Ollie didn’t get his second cap until the infamous Irish tour to Australia in 1979.

His three-year sojourn was forced through injury and the arrival on the scene of another rugby great, Tony Ward, who was interviewed on these pages this time last year.

Having been injured for most of that season, Ollie was admittedly “very happy to even have been named” in the touring squad. 

Indeed, there was nobody more surprised than Ollie, other than perhaps Ward, when he was handed the No.10 jersey for the first test.

“It was one of the best feelings I had in my career,” he said.

Recalling that there was “no such thing as skype or mobile phones in those days”, Ollie said “everyone at home was completely oblivious to the surprise selection at the time”. 

To put into perspective just how much of a shock Ollie’s selection at out-half was at the time, on the same day the news broke that Pope John Paul II was to visit Ireland in September of that year, The Irish Press had as its front page headline: “Ward out, Campbell in.”

The Pope’s visit, which saw some three million people welcome the Pontiff at five different venues around the country, managed to nab the off-lead in the newspaper that day.

Australia

The tour to Australia was a success, with that Irish side becoming the first northern hemisphere team to win a test series as an individual country in the southern hemisphere. 

“I suppose in many ways that was the real start to my international career,” Ollie admits, adding that then coach Noel Murphy still reminds him to this day that if his “enormous decision” to select Ollie hadn’t worked he would now be an Australian citizen! 

It’s worth noting of course that all of this occurred while rugby was still an amateur sport.

Ollie explained that “without any exaggeration at all you would play for Ireland on a Saturday, it wouldn’t even cross your mind not to play for your club on the Sunday and then you would go back to work on the Monday”.

The IRB rules at the time were that no international team could meet and train more than 48 hours before kick-off at the weekend, so the Irish squad would typically gather for lunch in the Shelbourne Hotel on the Thursday before a Saturday test and would train afterwards. 

Working in the family business meant getting time off for rugby “was never an issue” for Ollie.

His family were in the rag trade, an industry Ollie still works in to this day, running his own company, Ollie Campbell Clothing, which he set up some 25 years ago.

Ollie lists among his career highlights winning the Triple Crown in February 1982, which was only the fifth in Ireland’s history and the first to be won in Lansdowne Road. 

There were of course the two Lions tours to South Africa in 1980 and New Zealand in 1983 which although unsuccessful, were “experiences of a lifetime” for all those who took part.

On the touchy subject of his retirement, Ollie said he is “finally actually beginning to cope with it quite well”. 

He’s speaking tongue-in-cheek of course, but this reporter gets the impression there’s a mild truth in the remark.

Chronic hamstring problems forced Ollie’s retirement at the tender age of 29.

“It was very difficult to go from being so immersed in the game feeling that my best rugby was still ahead of me to have to retire. It was very tough. It was very difficult. It took a lot of getting used to,” he said.

Ollie threw himself into his business but admitted that “there is no real replacement for playing” the game. 

“Not everyone gets to retire on their own terms and I certainly didn’t. It was a tough time but like everything else you just have to get on with it. 

“The fact that my career stopped early would be one of the major regrets and disappointments in my life,” he said.

Turning to what gives him strength, Ollie revealed that his faith is a “very important” part of his life. “I’m a weekly Mass goer. It would be a rare Sunday that I wouldn’t get Mass,” he said. “I believe. My parents would have been a massive influence on that. They were both very strong believers and then you add in the Jesuit influence as well. I have a very strong faith. It’s a very important part of my life,” he said.

On the subject of faith, Ollie recalled a conversation with one of his idols, another rugby great, Jack Kyle.

Kyle briefly explained ‘Pascal’s Wager’ to him as “it’s better to live a life as if there is a God, just in case!”

“So that features strongly as well,” Ollie admitted. 

Looking forward to Christmas, Ollie said it’s a time that should be “all about family”. “I have 11 nieces and nephews so Christmas really revolved around them,” he said.

Looking beyond that, to the future, Ollie said he is beginning to become more aware of his own morality. 

He’s just 61 but describes his life as a play. Having competed the first two acts, he now has “question marks” around what to do as he enters the final third.

“What to do with my third act has been fermenting in the back of my mind recently,” he said.

One thing is for sure, whatever route the great Ollie Campbell takes, his admirers would love to see an encore.

They say the house always wins but Barney Curley begs to differ.  He’s is one of those rare jack of all trades that ends up mastering a few along the way. 

The one time Jesuit seminarian turned horse trainer and professional gambler now finds himself receiving a parliamentary award for his philanthropy. 

Barney was presented with the Oireachtas Human Dignity Group’s 2015 Human Life, Human Rights and Human Dignity Award at a ceremony in Leinster House last week in recognition of his work with Direct Aid for Africa (DAFA), a charity he co-founded in 1997.

Curley is a colourful character, perhaps best known for orchestrating the infamous Yellow Sam betting coup which cleaned out the bookies in 1975. 

He was heralded as a genius this time around, however, for his work in Africa, transforming countless lives for the better. 

Efforts

Thanks to his efforts, over €5.75 million has been spent on schools and hospitals, mainly in Zambia.

Even after receiving his award though, Barney “still can’t quite figure out” how he ended up winning it.

“I don’t really deserve this because I consider it a privilege at my stage in life to be able to do what I do. I think God has granted me a great privilege late on in life,” he told The Irish Catholic.

Barney now plans to present his award to his “heroes”, the Dominican sisters in Zambia.

“I’m going to take that award to Zambia and bring it to the Dominican convent there. It’s really them that deserve it.

“They are my heroes. The care that they give to people out there is incredible,” he said.

Barney’s Catholic faith is “everything” to him. “My faith means everything to me. It’s very important to have God in your life.”

The daily massgoer’s faith was inspired by his parents. “My parents set a great example. They went to Mass every day until they were not able to go anymore. That had a big influence on my life and I try to go to daily Mass too,” he said.

Barney’s decision to invest his efforts charitably into Africa dates back to a conversation he had with Fr Eugene O’Reilly, a Kiltegan missionary in Zambia, soon after the tragic death of his son Charlie, who died in a car accident in 1995. 

Fr O’Reilly “fascinated” Barney. “He had a little case with a change of shirt and trousers and that was about it but he was so happy,” he said.

The “peace of mind” the priest had despite owning so little materially made the professional gambler question his own outlook on life.

“I thought to myself there has to be some other way. I had all the toys – big houses, big cars, big ego, but there was just something missing.”

He decided to make the trip to Zambia to see things for himself and was inspired to set up DAFA after seeing first-hand the poverty people were living in there. The rest is history. 

Barney returned from Kavu in rural Zambia where he has recently opened a new hospital, run by the Dominican sisters, to receive the honour from the Oireachtas Human Dignity Group. 

The group was established to promote discussion in Leinster House about the importance of respecting human dignity at all stages of life. 

Membership is informal, and the group’s activities are open to all members of the Oireachtas and MEPs who share its aims and are interested in participating. 

Curley is only the second recipient of the honour. Last year’s inaugural award was presented to Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, founder of Mary’s Meals.

As previously mentioned, Barney rose to prominence after pulling off one of Ireland’s most famous betting coups in 1975.  

In the weeks leading up to the National Hunt race at the small Co. Meath track at Bellewstown in June of that year, the betting mastermind devised an elaborate scheme in which he wisely backed a highly unfancied racehorse he owned named Yellow Sam.  

He spent weeks plotting and planning, and by race day had an army of ‘layers’ spread throughout the country, each poised to place a bet of anything between £50 and £300 in hundreds of off-course bookies shops 15 minutes before the 3pm race start. In all, he was going to bet in excess of £15,000, virtually his entire savings.

Gamble

The most important factor in the gamble was to ensure that Yellow Sam started at 20/1 or better. The issue Barney had to overcome was that once the off-course bookies realised money was piling on the horse, they’d inform course bookies to lay off their liabilities, inevitably causing Yellow Sam’s starting price to plummet.

But Barney had handpicked Bellewstown for one specific reason – there was only one public telephone at the track. He had close friend, Benny O’Hanlon, pretend he needed to contact a dying aunt, which persuaded others to allow him to use the phone for the half hour in the lead up to the race until just after the horses were off.

In the end, Yellow Sam successfully negotiated the 13 hurdles and won easily by two-and-a-half lengths. In all, Barney collected about £300,000, a significant sum of money at that time, while some believe that his take was considerably more.

Barney insists there was nothing illegal or immoral about what he did, arguing that he simply outwitted the system and took advantage of unique circumstances.

Curley courted controversy again in 1984, when he decided to sell his Co. Westmeath mansion, Middleton House, by way of a raffle. 

The tickets were priced £200 each and a proportion of the sum raised was to go to the local GAA club. As far as Barney was concerned, there was nothing illegal in what he was doing. 

After expenses, he ended up netting £1 million for the house, which was sold almost a decade later for just £300,000 at auction.

Barney went on to win a trainer’s licence in 1986 and kept a small stable of his own horses and trained them to win specific races, on which he would gamble heavily. 

He calculated he needed to make £400,000 a year from these bets just to keep the operation afloat, and says that there has never been a single year in which he ended up in the red from his gambling.

More recently, in 2010, despite the far more sophisticated systems of modern bookmakers, Curley attempted emulate his feats of 1975 and succeeded once again.

That particular coup, involving four horses, three trained by him and one that he had previously owned, reportedly netted him millions. 

More recently still Barney has admitted his connection to the four-horse coup that cost bookmakers an estimated £2million sterling in January of last year.

Curley is well aware that money can’t buy him happiness though. 

“Someday we’ll meet God and I believe he knows all our faults,” Barney said, adding that he maintains humanity will be judged on those powerful words from Matthew’s Gospel: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

“If we can pass that exam I think we will be okay,” he said.

This reporter isn’t a betting man, but if he was to fancy a flutter, he reckons Barney Curley will be okay in the end. 

“We cannot adequately honour the men of 1916 if we do not work and strive to bring about the Ireland of their desire,” declared President Eamon de Valera in 1966, but it has not always been easy to say what kind of Ireland the rebels of 1916 sought to bring about.

The Rising was for decades seen as an almost holy affair, led by men who were spoken of in quasi-religious terms and who had sought to establish Ireland as a free and pure Catholic nation. Historians have long dismantled and refuted such simplistic readings of the Rising, but in rightly doing so have inadvertently left the ground free for others to claim the Rising for all manner of causes that would have been alien to the rebels. 

It should be no surprise to anyone studying the period to see that freedom of religion was the first liberty proclaimed for the citizens of the putative republic.

“The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens,” began the Proclamation’s section on citizens’ rights, and although this was almost certainly intended at least in part as a response to the Ulster Covenant claim that home rule would be “subversive of our civil and religious freedom”, it reflected too how the national cause had long been inextricable from Catholicism. 

Oppression

Discrimination against Catholics since Penal times had forged close ties between Catholicism and nationalism that flourished long past the ending of formal oppression; to many who took part in the Rising and the subsequent War of Independence, integral to the idea of Irish freedom was the freedom to be Catholic.

It is startling to see how few of the revolutionary generation the Bureau of Military History later interviewed would claim they were driven by economic or class grievances – especially given the impoverished  living conditions and high mortality rates of early 20th-Century Dublin. Even members of James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army would typically eschew claims of economic oppression in favour of celebrating previous rebellions and lamenting historical English wrongs including the oppression and persecution of Catholics.

For most Volunteers around the country preparations for the Rising began with their Easter devotions. “All the Cork volunteers,” for example, “went to Confession on Easter Saturday night,” according to Riobárd Langford, and it was only when the police “saw so many of the Cork Volunteers going to Holy Communion on Sunday morning”, Eamonn Ahern said, “that they began to suspect something was going on”. 

Catholic devotions and sacraments were ubiquitous in the Rising. In the GPO, for example, where men queued for Confession beside the ammunition dump, the Rosary was prayed every evening and often  throughout the day. One volunteer, Frank Burke, observed that it was not unusual “to see a Volunteer with his rifle grasped firmly in his hands and his Rosary beads hanging from his fingers”. 

The Rosary was similarly recited every night at the South Dublin Union, where one Volunteer, Joseph Doolan, accidentally surprised Eamon Ceannt during his prayers. “I knocked, opened the door and saw him kneeling in the room, his Rosary beads in his hands, and the tears running down his cheeks.” 

A large white car was designated the “General Communion Building” at  Jacobs Biscuit Factory, where Máire Nic Shiubhlaing – who had played Cathleen Ni Houlihan in the eponymous play on the Abbey Theatre’s opening night 12 years earlier – said “every man in the place went to Confession”. 

Thomas MacDonagh’s brother John later related how the Capuchin friars heard Confessions there, and described Major John McBride telling him of the satisfaction he had derived from his first Confession in many years. “Just kept putting it off,” he explained.

Devotions continued after the rebels surrendered, with W.T. Cosgrave describing how one night at Richmond Barracks, after the Rosary had been recited and the captive rebels had settled down, MacBride told him his life-long prayer had been answered. He had “said three Hail Marys every day that he should not die until he had fought the British in Ireland.”

Given how Catholicism and nationalism were intertwined, it is perhaps unsurprising that all those executed for their roles in the Rising died as Catholics, including Sir Roger Casement, who previously told his then fellow Protestant Bulmer Hobson the typical Irish Catholic man was a “poor crawling coward”, fearing the priest “like the devil” and terrified for his “miserable” soul. 

Fearfulness

It was because of this fearfulness, he said, that “freedom of Ireland can only come through Protestants”. On August 2, however, Casement was received into the Catholic Church in London’s Pentonville Prison, less than a day before he was hanged.

Pearse, of course, was famously devout, a Catholic mystic who believed only a “blood sacrifice” could redeem Ireland . Imprisoned before his execution he penned a poem, ‘A Mother Speaks’, in which he casts his mother as likening him to Christ. 

“Dear Mary, that didst see thy first-born Son / Go forth to die amid the scorn of men /For whom He died, / Receive my first-born son into thy arms, / Who also hath gone out to die for men,” he wrote. 

Con Colbert, a daily massgoer who had taken Tom Clarke’s wife Kathleen to task for organising a ceilidh during Lent – unbeknownst to him, the Palm Sunday ceilidh was intended as cover for an IRB meeting – and who began Easter Monday by attending an early Mass, was no less religious. 

Neither was Seán Heuston, whose brother Michael, then in formation in Tallaght to become a Dominican priest, has left a detailed account of his last encounter with his brother and Seán’s final appeal “Pray, pray hard for me,” or ICA Commandant Michael Mallin, who on seeing his infant son for the last time urged him to become a priest. 

Willy Pearse and Michael O’Hanrahan were similarly religious, with the latter being described by the Capuchin Fr Augustine, who attended him before his death, as “one of the truest and noblest characters that it has ever been my privilege to meet”. 

Éamonn Ceannt had personally received a papal blessing from Pope Pius X in September 1908 when visiting Rome as piper for the Irish contingent of the Catholic Young Men’s Society, and it was only because of a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes that Thomas Kent acquired for his household oratory that there were not more casualties in the gunfight at the house, his brother William believed.

Ned Daly’s devotion showed itself perhaps most poignantly when he was shown to the bodies of Pearse, Clarke, and MacDonagh in a Kilmainham shed the day before his own execution. According to the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s sergeant Michael Soughley, after Daly stood to attention and saluted the remains: “He then took off his cap, knelt down and prayed for some time. He put on his cap again, saluted again and returned to his escort.”

The son of a papal count and a distant relative of the martyred – and later canonised – St Oliver Plunkett, Joseph Plunkett was a lifelong devout Catholic, who famously married his convert wife Grace Gifford just hours before his execution, the two being permitted to exchange no words beyond their wedding vows. 

His father visited Pope Benedict XV in early April, giving the Pope a letter containing an apparently garbled account of plans for the upcoming rebellion. Claims of a subsequent papal blessing thrilled the rebels, showing that the republic they wanted was a far cry from that of Wolfe Tone, who had famously lamented Napoleon’s failure to “destroy forever the papal tyranny”.

“Don’t you know that the Pope has blessed this thing?” Thomas MacDonagh asked his fellow Volunteer Liam Ó Bríain on Good Friday. His delight may seem strange given how, though deeply religious in his youth when he explored a vocation to the Holy Ghost Fathers, MacDonagh had long ceased to be a practicing Catholic. 

At the last, though, he too received the sacraments, and a document circulated in Dublin purporting to be his court martial speech. The document reported him as claiming he and his colleagues belonged to the “great unnumbered army of martyrs whose Captain is the Christ who died on Calvary”. 

Widely regarded as a forgery, it was characteristic of MacDonagh, “both in feeling and language”, according to his brother John who believed it was genuine. 

It is possible to overplay the Catholicism of the rebels, of course, as the Catholic Bulletin and others did in the Rising’s aftermath. MacDonagh was not the only rebel leader to have had complicated relationships with the Church and the Faith. 

Tom Clarke, for instance, was in many ways an old-fashioned anti-clerical Fenian, suspicious of ‘faith and fatherland’ nationalism and all too wary of how the Church had long opposed the Irish Republican Brotherhood as a secret oath-bound society. 

On the night before his execution, he told his wife he had dismissed the priest attending him as he had wanted him to express sorrow for his part in the Rising. “I told him to clear out of my cell quickly,” he said. “I was not sorry for what I had done, I gloried in it and the men who had been with me. To say I was sorry would be a lie, and I was not going to face my God with a lie on my tongue.” 

Seán MacDiarmada, who harboured anti-clerical sentiments of his own, was visited in his final days by his friend Fr Patrick Browne from Maynooth. 

Fr Browne later wrote that while MacDiarmada had spoken “fairly bitterly about the Church”, citing the treatment by Thurles clergy of the late Fenian Charles Kickham, he said while he had kept away from the Church for some time, “he had made his peace with God and had received the sacraments”.

Calvary

Having written in 1910 of how socialism and Catholicism could be compatible, shortly before the Rising James Connolly took to adopting the kind of religious language one might more naturally associate with Pearse, writing for example that “in all due humility and awe we recognise that of us, as of mankind at Calvary, it may truly be said ‘without the shedding of blood there is no redemption’”. 

Despite his frustration with how the Church had, he believed, interfered in the national cause in the past, Connolly was another who ultimately found solace in his faith, taking Communion before his death and urging his Protestant wife Lillie to become Catholic, which she did some months later. 

Hagiographic accounts of such leaders’ lives misrepresent them, blurring out their complexities in order to exalt them as saints in Ireland’s patriotic liturgy, but though it is clear that the leaders of the Rising had not wanted the new Ireland to be a narrowly sectarian state, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the “terrible beauty” born at Easter 1916 was a cradle Catholic.

Easter week 1916 was one of the rare occasions that The Irish Catholic did not go to print. Located at offices in Middle Abbey Street, at the heart of the violence in Dublin, some members of staff became trapped by flames and gunfire and one man was killed by bullets flying through a staircase window.

While the 1916 Rising is now seen as a pivotal step in Ireland’s path to independence and its leaders considered national heroes, in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, when Dublin city centre was reduced to rubble, there was much hostility towards the defeated insurgents. 

Seen through the eyes of a Catholic newspaper, which had supported the Home Rule political campaign and was now surrounded by death and destruction, it is perhaps understandable that the paper took a hard line against the Rising.

First issue

The first issue published by The Irish Catholic after the week of fighting covered the dates of April 29-May 6, 1916. Writing “while the echoes of musketry were yet ringing in the air and the fate of the paper was still in doubt”, an editorial on the rebellion did not hold back on making the paper’s views on the Rising and its leaders abundantly clear.

“The movement which had culminated in deeds of unparalleled bloodshed and destruction of property in the capital of Ireland was as criminal as it was insane,” the paper stated. “Only idiots or lunatics can ever have supposed that it could prove successful. Traitorous and treacherous as it undoubtedly was, it was most of all traitorous and treacherous to our native land.”

The paper went on to call on parliamentary representatives and leading citizens “to unite in pressing on the responsible authorities the imperative importance of adopting measures – financial and otherwise – for the removal of the difficulties which now confront many of our people”. 

“Cruel and enormous losses have been inflicted on numerous law-abiding citizens, and it seems to us that – in face of this regrettable fact – it is the bounden duty of the government to make known their readiness to at once provide the credit or the funds required to mitigate the disastrous effects of an intolerable outrage, not only against the law but against all the principles of common sense and the primary instincts of loyalty to Ireland.” 

The paper did not report on the death of a member of staff until the next issue of May 13 under the heading ‘Hemmed in by bullets and fire’. In what seems like a hierarchical or a class-based attitude to what happened at the offices of The Irish Catholic, the report outlined the “most trying experience” of two unfortunate production staff trapped in the building before mentioning the caretaker who was shot. 

“Though the premises in which the offices of The Irish Catholic are situated are in the very heart of the zone most devastated by fire and by the hail of bullets that swept the locality, the material injury done to them was happily light – only a few windows being broken – though the house was the scene of the lamentable tragedy described lower down,” begins the report.

“Two members of staff, Messrs Kavanagh and Green, had a most trying experience, being held up in the offices for three days while the fighting was at its height. They came to business on Thursday morning (27th) but finding no signs of work being resumed, were about to depart in the late afternoon when they were driven indoors by a hail of shrapnel and bullets. 

“The place was between two fires and insurgent snipers in houses in the vicinity added a third danger. When released by the military on Saturday night, the pair had not partaken of any food for a day and a half. 

“On Friday a new horror commenced, in the danger of the fire which was raging in the houses round, including the dwelling in which they had taken refuge. The only other occupant of the premises was the caretaker, Mr Watson, aged about 60, who on Friday evening lost his life in terribly tragic circumstances. He was going from a top room to the basement when a bullet penetrated a back window of the staircase and killed him instantly. 

“It appears that Mr Madden, a painter who occupied the adjoining home, had gone on to his roof to gauge the possibility of the fire reaching them when he was ‘potted’ by a sniper, being wounded in the head. 

“This drew further fire and the bullet that ended Mr Watson’s life. Mssrs Kavanagh and Green were unable to reach their homes until Sunday morning, April 30.”  

In the same issue under the heading “Dublin’s heroic priests” The Irish Catholic paid tribute to “the splendid gallantry and incessant labours of our Dublin priests, secular and regular, during the continuance of the Easter Monday rebellion”.

In an editorial proclaiming “Hats off to the priests of Dublin!” it stated that in every locality in which fighting occurred, priests were busy in “consoling families in anguish as to the fate of loved ones wounded or missing, in aiding in providing for the poorer residents of the respective districts whom circumstances had deprived of the necessities of life”.

The paper said “something akin is also to be reported of the sisterhoods of the convents in or adjacent to the perturbed areas” and it also applauded the “splendid work” done by the city’s hospitals and the “fortitude and tenacity” of the staff. “Nuns, doctors and nurses literally forgot all concerns for themselves in their anxiety to yield to every possible succour to the wounded.”

The priests of the pro-cathedral had to deal with the worst ravages of “flame and artillery destruction”. Fr O’Reilly CC risked his life walking through streets “raked with fire” to attend the wounded and dying, and the cathedral had to deal with a large “body of refugees who sought shelter from burning buildings and shell and rifle fire”.

The ministrations of the Capuchin community in Church Street brought them “continually in the line of fire from one side or the other”. “Thursday and Friday nights brought scenes of deadly conflict in their vicinity. The military were slowly but surely closing their cordon on the insurgents in Church St. and an armoured motor-car was careering about and spitting fire at some of the insurgent positions.” 

The paper said the fate of the monastery would have been uncertain if the resistance had held out much longer and the bullets that were “ringing about the place” nearly killed the father provincial, when some came crashing through his window.

The priests of Westland Row and Haddington Road areas and the Carmelites of Whitefriar’s Street were also praised for their efforts to attend the wounded and administer last rites under “heavy fire”.

The 1916 rebel leaders, however, were treated with ridicule and scorn by the paper. In a short report in the May 13 issue, the paper stated “all the signatories of the document proclaiming the Sinn Féin Republic have been executed”, with the exception of James Connolly. Patrick Pearse was described as a “nominal barrister”, founder of a failed school and a “man of ill-balanced mind, if not actually insane”, and said that electing him as leader called the sanity of the others into question. 

The report states that a large number of “unfortunate dupes of the plotters of a monstrous outbreak” were sentenced to imprisonment and many hundreds of prisoners were sent to England.

The “notorious Roger Casement” was a prisoner in the Tower of London after attempting to land arms off the coast of Kerry. 

The paper reported that the “dangerous mountebank” would be charged with high treason and went into some detail on claims that Casement had been campaigning for a German overthrow of England. The paper followed his trial closely in later issues and reported on his execution in the issue of October 12, 1916. 

Countess Markievicz, whose death sentence was “commuted to penal servitude for life”, was described as an “extreme Sinn Feiner” who led the mob cheers for strike leader Jim Larkin in 1913 after his arrest during the “Larkinite troubles”, and a raid at her house had found “a printing press and type used for printing pro-German literature”.

In an editorial on the Rising the paper said recriminations were not “statesmanlike” and “to us it seems sufficient to survey the admitted facts”, while placing the blame for the “abortive rebellion” on members of Sinn Féin “acting under German inspiration”. 

However, Dublin Castle officials and the Act of Union were also targeted, with the paper saying the rebellion would not have happened if the “administration of our national concerns had been in the hands of Irishmen”.

It said that the one “satisfactory circumstance” connected to the Rising was that the “overwhelming majority of our citizens and fellow countrymen had absolutely no sympathy with the Sinn Féin conspiracy and its German paymasters”.

The editorial described the Rising as an “outrage against all democratic and national principles” and expressed a fear that if the rebellion had succeeded Ireland would have been reduced to some kind of military dictatorship where the conspirators would have control of the ballot boxes. 

The Irish Catholic called for immediate government action to help the loyal citizens who had suffered as a result of the rebellion, and expressed a hope that it would discriminate between the authors of the “abominable and irreligious movement” and the “fools who were their dupes and instruments”. 

It claimed that many people had been ignorant of the purpose of taking up arms, thinking it was for one of the parades that a “fatuous Castle administration” had permitted to “become a usual spectacle on the streets of our city”. “A single charge of cavalry and the arrest of a few of the prominent conspirators a couple of weeks before would have saved Dublin from the enormous loss and ruin we all deplore today.”

In the following May 20 issue, the paper reported that Prime Minister Asquith met with prisoners arrested in the rebellion during his brief visit to Dublin. 

No details of the visit were available but The Irish Catholic expressed the hope that Mr Asquith could not fail to recognise the real intentions of those he interviewed and justice should prevail for the innocent who were interned at home and in England. 

The paper stated that many innocent people were rounded up for merely being at one time enrolled in Sinn Féin and that “little as we approve of the rebellion, we are not going to remain silent when unoffending fellow citizens are killed in cold blood and the responsible local military chiefs take no adequate steps to secure investigation”.

In the same issue the paper reported that a “very impressive appeal for clemency” for the rebels in Co. Wexford, particularly in Enniscorthy, had been made by the residents of the town, where there had been no loss of life and those taking part were “very young, many of them boys”.

In an editorial the paper said “whatever may be the defects and defaults of the established system of government in Ireland – and we are certainly among the least likely to be found contending that it is irreproachable – it seems to us that the idea that it should exist only at the mercy of any group of conspirators who may take it into their heads to seek its violent overthrow – by means of arms and money supplied by alien enemies of the Empire – is a theory inherently monstrous”.

Rebels

The paper felt that the small group of rebels should not have claimed to speak for the people of Ireland or, without any political experience, attempted to seize control of the country. 

“The liberty, property and prosperity of every citizen, however humble, would have been at the mercy of a group of self-appointed dictators, destitute of even a shadow of a claim to the confidence of the nation.” The Irish Catholic also did not shrink from criticising the authorities, saying that Lord Aberdeen “reduced the Viceregal office to a level beneath contempt” and the chief secretary “practically abandoned his duties in this country”.

The Irish Catholic was a stanch supporter of Home Rule and believed the rebellion proved that the government created by the Act of Union did not work. 

It said Ireland still demanded native government because “she believes that she yet possess men honest and conscientious enough to really rule – men who will not pander to every manifestation of popular ignorance or prejudice, and who will prefer the peace, security and liberty of all classes of our people to the gaining of personal advancement by winning the fleeting favour of an ill-informed proletariat. 

“We need say no more, but to say less would be traitorism to the highest and holiest interests of Ireland. The lesson written on the ruined walls of our city is one which everyone who is not a fool can easily read.”

IC caretaker represents many anonymous victims

Peter Costello

William Watson, a painter and part-time caretaker for The Irish Catholic, is representative of the many anonymous victims of the Easter Rising in the way in which he died and was buried.

The Irish Catholic in those days published on a Saturday. Though none of the editorial staff made it through the barricades thrown up by the military to make up the paper that week, two of the production staff arrived in the offices on Thursday, April 27. Once inside No. 55 Middle Abbey Street, they found they could not get out.

The next day, April 28, to see how the fires raging to the south were encroaching on the building, Mr Denis Madden (63) who lived in No. 54, a house painter, got up on his roof. He attracted the fire of snipers and was shot dead.  He left a wife, daughter and a son of 27 with learning difficulties.

In The Irish Catholic office William Watson had also gone up on the roof and was making his way down stairs to the basement when he was shot dead by a sniper through a back window. A bullet passed through his heart killing him at once.

William Watson, then nearly 60, had been born in Queen’s County (now Laois). He was married to a Dublin woman, and they had two sons, Francis (born about 1889) and William (born about 1892). In 1916 the Watsons and their son William (who was working in an office) lived in Swift’s Row (just behind the office building – the houses were mostly tenements). Francis, a painter, lived in Marlborough Street.

Mr Watson’s body was taken to Jervis Street Infirmary two streets away. There a doctor pronounced him dead, and a death certificate was issued to his wife, who had come over from Swift’s Row to be present.

Dead and wounded

The hospital was receiving dead and wounded from all over that quarter of the city. The mortuary was quickly filled. Mr Watson’s remains were removed (perhaps under cover of night) to Glasnevin Cemetery.

He was buried there in a hurried way on May 2. He is in a single unmarked grave in a common plot in the St Paul’s Section (on the other side of the Finglas Road). 

That day he was but one of 68 people buried in Glasnevin. Their families were not, it seems, present. 

As Mr Madden’s religious persuasion was unknown to the cemetery authorities, he was buried with a brief Catholic religious ceremony, as the authorities assumed the casualties would be largely Catholic. A priest was on hand over the week to do this. There are plans for a memorial with all the names on it to be raised sometime next year.

During the insurrection 485 people died, 54% of these were civilians, men, women and children, mostly from gunshot wounds. Details are still lacking about many of them. They in some ways are the real victims of the Rising.   

William Watson’s death was at least registered by his wife later in May. That of Mr Madden next door was never registered.

Later death certificates were issued for the executed leaders, but their deaths were not registered until 2000, at the behest of Bertie Ahearn, making early preparations for the 1916 celebrations.

If that seems odd, odder still is the fact that Michael Collins’ death has still not been registered.

To judge by The Irish Catholic in the Rising’s immediate aftermath, Dublin’s ashes had barely cooled before Ireland’s bishops took to their pulpits en masse to condemn the rebellion.

For Cashel and Emly’s Bishop John Harty, eventual chair of the committee that would organise the 1932 Eucharistic Congress and the man after whom the Munster schools hurling trophy is named, the people of his diocese and especially Tipperary town, were to be congratulated for not joining in the rebellion against Ireland’s interests. 

“We all know,” this newspaper reported, “that the people of Ireland at large do not want any revolutionary measures. We are perfectly well aware that the people of Ireland believe that by constitutional means they can gain substantial redress of the grievances. The history of the past has shown that all revolutionary measures are doomed to failure. 

“The people of this archdiocese and of this town realise that to the fullest extent,” he continued, “and hence, during the last sorrowful fortnight they kept calm, showing that now, as always, they are true, patriotic Irishmen.”

Commissions

Cork and Ross’ Bishop Denis Kelly, who had been bishop since 1897 and served on several royal commissions, including one in 1911 for projected Home Rule finance, was apparently far more strident when speaking at Mass in Skibbereen. Describing the Rising as “a senseless, meaningless debauch of blood”, indefensible on any basis, he said that in such an unlawful war the killing of men was murder pure and simple. 

Claiming that the Irish had been taxed more leniently than the English and Scots since the Great War had begun, he said the Rising was bound to worsen the miseries and deprivations of the war, not least by lengthening it. Such, he said, was probably its aim, citing the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s claim that the Rising was not a truly Irish rebellion, but was a German-orchestrated attempt to discourage the United States from pushing Germany to abandon its U-Boat campaign against vessels supplying Britain. 

The manipulative hand of Germany was similarly seen by Tuam’s auxiliary bishop Michael Higgins as behind the Rising. Blaming “the Sinn Féin section” for the lives lost, with those urging them forward being doubly responsible, he said they would have to render “a fearful account” for the blood that had been shed. 

The Rising was, he said, asking where the German army was that had been promised to assist the rebels, “the old, old story of relying on false promises of foreign aid”.

Dr Higgins returned to the issue of the Rising when speaking at Glenamaddy Church some weeks later, saying that looking back on it appeared “like a nightmare”, one that hardly seemed possible. “Let them think of the insanity and utter madness of any body of men, comparatively only a handful as these were,” he said, “rising up against the English Army, which amounted to five millions of men.”

Urging them to “think of the utter insanity of any body of persons without ammunition and guns, except rifles, shot guns, and a few machine guns, rising up against that army”, he conceded that some of the rebels were driven by good motives, but that the Irish were poor enough without the loss of lives and property the Rising had caused. 

Ireland’s people, more than anything, “had their hearts fixed” upon their land, and had been fighting for it all their lives, he said, claiming that most of this had already been won and what remained due would come “in its own good time”. If the rebellion had succeeded at all, this would have been taken from them, he said, such that “farmers and everyone associated with them had nothing to gain but everything to lose” from such a rebellion. 

Wondering what inspired the Rising’s leaders and those few rebels who took part in a minor incident in Athenry, he said they had “turned aside from the advice and guidance of the Church and the recognised leaders of the country”. Pointing out that the Church condemned secret societies, he said of the rebels, “they would not listen to the advice of the Church, which condemned rebellion when there was not a just or sufficient reason for it”.

Bishop John Mangan of Kerry was not slow to condemn those “misguided men, who, if they had their way, would plunge Ireland into the horrors of civil war”. Speaking in Killarney Cathedral, he asked why the rebels had been so keen to fight Germany’s battles, pointing to how Sir Roger Casement, once he had served Germany’s purposes, had been “cast helplessly adrift on the Irish coast”. With Casement having come ashore at Banna Strand in the bishop’s own diocese, this added local colour to his speech. 

The responsibility for the Rising rested in large part, he said, with those Ulstermen who had founded the Ulster Volunteer Force in an attempt to discourage Britain from introducing Home Rule to Ireland, leading Irish nationalists to follow their example.

Policies

“Much has been said in these latter days,” he said, “of the body called the Irish Volunteers. Some of them have adopted policies and lent themselves to courses of which no wise Nationalist could approve. But in justice to them as a body they professed to be opposed to any revolutionary measures. I am informed, and I believe correctly, that Mr McNeill himself issued an appeal to his followers to abstain from any illegal course of action. 

“If this be true,” he continued, “I appeal with all the strength and authority I possess to the young men who are members of the Irish Volunteers to be more faithful to the pledge of their constitution, and not allow themselves on any account to be drawn into illegal courses by evil-minded men affected by Socialistic and Revolutionary doctrines.”

Clonfert’s Bishop Thomas Gilmartin, however, while condemning the Rising likewise agreed that blame for it needed to be shared with those Ulster unionists who in 1913 had reintroduced the threat of violent insurrection into Irish life and the London government that allowed them to do so. “This thing was allowed to go too far,” he said in Loughrea Cathedral, continuing, “Sir Edward Carson and his Volunteers were permitted practically to do what they liked.” Now that the rebellion had been quashed, the bishop pleaded for restraint, calling on the authorities and the military to be guided by the principles of humanity.

Bishop Joseph Hoare, Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, likewise appealed from Rathdine Church for the authorities to refrain from a policy of vengeance, saying that the time had come for reconciliation. 

Preaching that there was no excuse for revolution, and that it could never be lawful to take up arms to depose the ruling Sovereign, he lamented the state of Catholic education in Ireland, as indicated by how many Irish politicans were badly instructed on this point, wrongly convinced that a united people could justly make and depose kings. 

Outlining the basic principles of Just War theory, the bishop said the Church could not condone the Rising, which he called “a mad and sinful adventure”, devoid of sufficient cause for revolt for a reasonable chance of success. 

On the face of it, then, anyone relying on public statements from the hierarchy could have been forgiven for assuming that Ireland’s bishops were of one mind in their condemnation of the Rising, albeit with slight distinctions in their apportioning of blame. The truth, however, looks not to have been so simple.

Ireland had 31 bishops in 1916, and it seems that while a handful spoke out against the Rising, the overall majority said very little publicly on the matter, and the silence of the majority may say more than the few words we have from a vocal minority. 

Bishop Michael Fogarty of Killaloe, who like Dr Hoare had cautioned against governmental vengeance in a May 14 homily, in 1949 told the Bureau of Military History that the hierarchy had in fact been divided on the issue, and were – generally speaking – divided as much by age as by attitude.

While the bishops never discussed the Rising in council, he subsequently clarified, “Individually they would be all for the independence of Ireland: but the shooting troubled some of the older members, whose names need not be recorded. 

“The first outbreak on Easter Monday shocked and annoyed the general public: but this was only for a few days,” he continued, “when it dawned upon the people that the Easter leaders had deliberately in good faith risked their lives for Ireland’s sake, the public rallied wholeheartedly behind them.”

Asked about his own view of the Rising’s morality, Dr Fogarty said “so much may be said on both sides”, though he indicated that he was inclined to see it as justifiable, writing afterwards that the rebellion had a kind of retroactive authority: “after a few days the whole nation mobilised behind the Easter Rising, and made it justifiable as far as required.”

Sympathetic

The bishop had clearly been at least sympathetic to the Rising at the time, to judge by how he said that when news of the Rising first reached his diocese most people condemned it out of hand, but that he advised them, “not to be carried away by impulse”. 

He described how an old parish priest, on first hearing of the Rising, quoted Hebrews 9.22, ‘nulla salus sine effusione sanguinis’ – that there’s no redemption without bloodshed, and observed how “As a matter of fact all or nearly all the big civil revolts that afterwards eventuated in such tremendous results present in their first beginnings moral issues I should not like to decide upon.”

Dr Edward O’Dwyer, Limerick’s bishop who died in 1917, had maintained privately to him that the Rising was morally justifiable, he said, and this seems to be borne out by other events at the time. 

In August 1915 Dr O’Dwyer had written to Irish Nationalist Party leader John Redmond, urging him to work for peace rather than the continuation of the Great War, saying “the prolongation of this war for one hour beyond what is absolutely necessary is a crime against God and humanity”. 

Following Redmond’s response he addressed him that November in an open letter published in a few provincial papers, maintaining that Irish people should not be shedding blood for British ends. “Their crimes is that they are not ready to die for England,” he wrote. “Why should they? What have they or their forebears ever got from England that they should die for her?” As for Redmond’s belief that Home Rule had been achieved – it was being held in abeyance until the war ended and the opposition of the Ulster unionists had been addressed – he was scathing, saying that “any intelligent Irishman” could tell it was merely “a simulacrum of Home Rule, with an express notice that it is never intended to come into operation”.

Dr O’Dwyer would be the first bishop in 1916 to condemn General Maxwell’s handling of the Rising and its aftermath. 

The Commander-in-Chief, responsible for the administration of martial law in the country, had written to the bishop to ask him to remove two of his priests, Drumcollogher’s Fr Thomas Wall and Newcastlewest’s Fr Michael Hayes, from their parishes, describing them as “a dangerous menace to the peace and safety of the Realm”. Had they been laymen, he said, they would already have been placed under arrest. 

Unfortunately for General Maxwell, his first charge against the priests was to say that Fr Wall had preached against conscription on the previous November 14; what the Drumcollogher priest had in fact done was to read from his bishop’s open letter to John Redmond. In response on May 17, Dr O’Dwyer said that the two men were “both excellent priests” who, while holding “strong national views”, did not seem to have “violated any law civil or ecclesiastical”. 

Referring to General Maxwell as “military dictator of Ireland”, he said he could not help him, saying, “the events of the past few weeks would make it impossible for me to have any part in proceedings which I regard as wantonly cruel and oppressive”.

Contrasting the British treatment of “buccaneers” in advance of the Second Boer War to their handling of the Rising’s leaders, he said, “You took care that no plea for mercy should interpose on behalf of the poor young fellows who surrendered to you in Dublin. The first information which we got of their fate was the announcement that they had been shot in cold blood.”

“Personally,” he continued, “I regard your action with horror, and I believe that it has outraged the conscience of the country. Then the deporting of hundreds and even thousands of poor fellows without a trial of any kind seems to me an abuse of power as fatuous as it is arbitrary and your regime has been one of the worst and blackest chapters in the history of misgovernment of the country.”

The ordinary clergy around the country had like the bishops been divided on the Rising, with The Irish Catholic describing one Ratoath priest scorning it as “a feeble attempt… to establish a toy republic, under the jurisdiction and by the liberty of Liberty Hall”. Younger priests, however, were generally not unsympathetic to the rebels’ aims, and the priest who accompanied Fr Fogarty to his 1949 interview said he had been a seminarian in Maynooth in 1916, and that he and his fellow students “had unanimously and unenthusiastically favoured the Rising”. 

Dr O’Dwyer’s response to General Maxwell served to boost the confidence of the younger clergy, and helped accelerate the shift in public opinion towards support for the rebels. Support for constitutional nationalism – now inextricably linked with the seemingly inevitable partition of the country – began to collapse among people, priests and bishops. 

On June 19, Derry’s Bishop Charles McHugh told John Redmond that he would rather 50 more years of direct rule from London than accept the British attempt to settle Ireland through excluding six Ulster counties as a separate Home Rule area. With his fellow northern bishops taking a similar line, it was clear that the Irish Church, if not yet committed to immediate independence, was no longer willing to settle for Home Rule.

Far from being a triumphalist affair, glorifying in the Rising’s heroism and worrying at old wounds, the Republic’s 1966 celebrations were always intended as a bridge to the future for an outward-looking country that aimed to take a seat as an equal partner in the European Economic Community at a time when wages were growing and living standards were improving.

Although the destruction of Nelson’s Pillar in March 1966 raised fears of IRA violence during the golden jubilee, the celebrations passed off peacefully, which did not stop Ian Paisley organising a 5000-strong demonstration against the North’s unofficial commemorations and a thanksgiving service for the defeat of the 1916 rebels; within two months of the anniversary, the UVF declared war on the IRA.

In Dublin, meanwhile, efforts were made to ensure the Rising would be celebrated in an inclusive and forward-looking manner, but insofar as the opening of the Garden of Remembrance on April 11, 1966 was intended to be an ecumenical event, albeit one in which Archbishop John Charles McQuaid would be the only religious leader to bless the site, it proved something of an embarrassment.

Ceremony

The leaders of Ireland’s Jewish, Quaker and Methodist communities excused themselves from attending, while the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr George Simms, and Revd William McDowell representing the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly found themselves accidentally excluded from the ceremony.

The two men were picked up by a state car after Dr Simms had preached at a commemorative service at St Patrick’s cathedral, but arriving three minutes late, the clergymen found themselves locked out.

The Sunday People claimed “the man with the key could not be found”, but the clerics’ absence was mainly due, rather, to a wish to be discreet. The garden had an elaborate gate that opened with the pressing of a button, taking half a minute to do so. At the start of the ceremony, President De Valera had been presented with a ceremonial key, modelled on the oldest key known in Ireland, which he had used to press the button to open the gates. For the episode to have been repeated for their belated benefit would, the Protestant ministers evidently felt, have turned the ceremony into something of a farce.

Intended as a symbolic detail in a ceremony intended to signal the transformation and modernisation of Ireland, the faux-antique key harking back to Ireland’s past while the electrical gate reflected a technological future, the incident instead ended up as emblematic of a very different reality: the public commemoration of the Rising’s fiftieth anniversary was an almost exclusively Catholic phenomenon.

Given the religiosity of most of those who took part in and led the Rising, and the overwhelmingly Catholic nature of society in the Republic of 50 years later, this was perhaps inevitable.

Twelve centres outside Dublin hosted official commemorations. Although the army authorities oversaw the planning of these celebrations, establishing local committees and contacting Old IRA members and relevant groups, the celebrations generally lacked a martial flavour, and were notably less militaristic than the 2006 commemorations for the Rising’s 90th anniversary.

Official celebrations around the country focused on community and sporting organisations, typically entailing Masses, parades, cultural and sporting events, and lectures. 

Readings of the 1916 Proclamation were encouraged, but orations and speeches were not, as speeches and graveside orations had long been associated with republicans; as one-time IRA Chief of Staff Hugh McAteer observed at a Letterkenny commemoration, the 1916 rebels “apparently may be admired but must not be emulated”.

The committees which organised the official celebrations were in the main made up of men who were respected members of their community – GAA members, Knights of Columbanus, teachers, bank managers, and farmers, for example – and had been in, or were somehow linked to, the Old IRA.

Many veterans of the Rising and its aftermath were still alive during the 1966 celebrations, so there was little need to exaggerate the Rising’s importance; attempts to claim it for causes alien or at best tangential to its aims were never likely to succeed.

Not all local commemorations were official; several places saw two parades taking place, with unofficial parades as likely as official ones to feature commemorative Masses and prayers at cemeteries.

Joseph Clarke, who had served under de Valera during the Rising and been courier for the first Dáil, refusing to attend the official ceremonies, insisted at Glasnevin Cemetery, which he attended as part of an unofficial parade, that “if the men they killed in ’16 were alive today, they’d be up here with us. Our parade is much closer to what they fought for than the one in O’Connell Street”.

Some linked with the Rising evidently shared Clarke’s views. Seán MacDiarmada’s sisters, for instance, shunned the official Kiltyclogher ceremony in favour of the larger parade organised by the National Graves Association, and Pearse’s sister Margaret threatened to bequeath St Enda’s school to a religious order rather than to the State.

Parade

Many others, however, didn’t, with 600 veterans on Easter Sunday in the viewing stand on O’Connell Street to watch the military parade and the subsequent people’s parade. 

The Federation of the Old IRA had opted to watch the parades, rather to participate in them, because of its members’ age.

A further 200,000 people gathered to watch the parade in Dublin, many more watching it on Teilifís Éireann (TÉ), then just four years old but providing coverage to 98% of the country, with roughly 55% of homes owning televisions.

TÉ was well placed to commemorate the anniversary, having since its foundation conducted interviews with more than 70 survivors of the revolutionary period. 

In making programmes that would depend on these interviews, Roibéárd Ó Faracháin, Radio Éireann’s Controller of Programmes, said “while still seeking historical truth, the emphasis will be on homage”.

RTÉ’s commemoration began with the 19 Thomas Davis lectures on Radio Éireann entitled Leaders and Men of the 1916 Rising, while The Course of Irish History aired on TÉ; both programmes included historians with critical views of the Rising. 

Twelve radio plays were broadcast on historical topics, and two documentary series called On Behalf of the Provisional Government and The Week of the Rising were broadcast on television and radio respectively, with two Rising-related pageants – medieval dramas, popular in the early 20th Century – performed at Croke Park and Casement Park being broadcast on TÉ.

During Easter Week alone, RTÉ broadcast over 53 hours of material about the Rising, the centrepiece of the commemoration being Insurrection, a week-long dramatic reconstruction of the Rising as though broadcast as a contemporary live event. 

Featuring mock reportage, talking heads, and Ray McAnally as a studio anchor, it was a hugely ambitious project, seeming at the beginning, according to its writer Hugh Leonard, “as gallant and doomed as the Rising itself”.

Seemingly doomed from the start, Insurrection proved a spectacular triumph, and the range and quality of Rising-related programming during 1966 showed RTÉ as a flagship for the Ireland Lemass wanted to show the world, looking forward and beyond its horizons, whilst remembering and honouring how it had come to be.

With the subsequent outbreak of the Troubles in the North, such remembrance would become increasingly complicated.

At the age of 102, Fr Joseph Mallin SJ has the double accolade of being one of the oldest Irish priests in the world and the last surviving child of an executed 1916 leader.

The son of Cmdt Michael Mallin, then chief-of-staff of the Irish Citizen’s Army who led the St Stephen’s Green garrison during the Rising, with Countess Markievicz second in command, Fr Joseph was just two and a half years old when his father faced a firing squad. 

Cmdt Mallin had signed up to the British army when he was 14-years-old. He loved music and joined the army as a drummer. (Fr Joseph used to play the flute which had belonged to his father – the same one his father had played in Liberty Hall in the Workers’ Orchestra on the eve of the 1916 Rising. The flute and his father’s watch are now in the National Museum in Dublin).

Michael Mallin served for many years in India and Afghanistan, winning the India Medal of 1895 with the Punjab Frontier and Tirah clasps in 1897-98. His experiences in the British army saw him turn to socialism and on his return to Ireland he became a leading official in the silk weavers’ union and second in command and chief training officer of the Irish Citizen Army, which was formed during the 1913 lock-out to protect workers.

Cmdt Mallin surrendered on Sunday, April 30, 1916 under orders from James Connolly. At his court-martial he downplayed his involvement in the Rising. In his statement, Mallin said, “I had no commission whatever in the Citizen Army. I was never taken into the confidence of James Connolly. I was under the impression that we were going out for manoeuvres on Sunday.” 

He added, “Shortly after my arrival at St Stephen’s Green the firing started and Countess Markievicz ordered me to take command of the men as I had been so long associated with them. I felt I could not leave them and from that time I joined the rebellion.”

However, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. 

Michael Mallin summoned his wife, pregnant with their fifth child, and his young son Joseph to his cell in Kilmainham Jail just before he was executed on May 8, 1916. 

Fr Joseph has no memory of the visit to his father’s cell. Now based in Hong Kong, he told a local newspaper: “But what were the feelings my father must have had? Four children, another one coming, we were destitute, he’d brought his family to that. And during the court martial, my father did try to avoid execution. He knew they wouldn’t shoot Countess Markievicz, a woman – should he use that? It must have been a terrible thing for his conscience. He said she was the commander. Of course it wasn’t true but what could he do? When you’re faced with these things, what answer do you give?”

In his last letter to his wife, Michael Mallin said that “I find no fault with the soldiers or the police” and asked her “to pray for all the souls who fell in this fight, Irish and English”. He also addressed his baby son in the letter saying, “Joseph, my little man, be a priest if you can”, and also requested that his daughter Una become a nun, which she also did.

Indeed, three of the five Mallin children ultimately entered religious life, with brother Sean leading the way as a Jesuit, then followed by Joseph, and Una, who joined the Loreto order.

Mrs Mallin was the only relative of the executed leaders to participate in the State’s first official commemoration of the Rising in 1924, but in recent interviews Fr Mallin has said that his mother rarely talked about her executed husband: “I think she didn’t want us to brood on it”, but he did see her cry once on the anniversary of his death. 

“I saw her crying once, that would have been in the early 1920s. My sister and I were playing, and I went to the kitchen and my mother was standing at the window. I can be very clear about the day – it was a fine, May day. And I’ve often thought since: was it May 8? That was the anniversary of when he was executed. I walked away, told my sister and we both kept quiet,” he said. 

The Jesuits were a natural choice for the Mallin brothers who had been educated by them. Joseph joined in 1932, after attending the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin that year, and was ordained in 1946. Perhaps, inevitably, due to that timeline, while previous seminarians travelled to continental Europe to further their studies, World War II kept Fr Joseph firmly on Irish soil until he was selected to lead a group of young Jesuits overseas in 1948 – to China.

By his own description, Fr Joseph was not particularly unsettled by this posting. “Others make the decision and we follow,” he explained simply in an interview with The Irish Catholic during a brief visit home to Ireland in 2009 from Hong Kong, where he is regarded as a leading light in Catholic education.

Spritely and patiently willing to submit to all questions posed, he warned, however: “The eyes are excellent, the ears are not so good.”

His original mission in China was terminated after two years following the rise of Mao Tse Tung. “We had to leave at once to Hong Kong,” Fr Joseph said, relating the story of a river journey on a steamboat, constantly alert to attack. “The captain graciously offered me his bed on the bridge, an area otherwise sealed off for protection,” he said.

Hong Kong was being flooded with refugees and difficult times were made worse by a great fire on Christmas Day in 1953, which killed some 65,000 people. While living under threat from the neighbouring Communist regime, Fr Joseph said “the Jesuits moved with the times” and set about building what became the first of three schools, and Fr Joseph dedicated the rest of his working life to education in Hong Kong.

Fr Joseph came back to Ireland in 2006 for a place of honour viewing the major commemorations of the 1916 Rising, which included a wreath-laying ceremony in Kilmainham Jail led by the then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Fr Joseph visited Kilmainham again during his 2009 visit to Dublin and tells a story of being asked for an entrance fee at the door. 

“I couldn’t refrain from a wee joke. I said, ‘The first time I came here I didn’t have to pay an entrance fee’ – but went on – “Ah, that time I was only two and a half years of age – and I was asleep’.”

After his private 102nd birthday celebrations in Hong Kong in September this year, Fr Joseph’s niece Una O’Callanáin said her uncle remains as mentally alert as ever and still writes to her in Irish on a regular basis.  

However, it is believed unlikely that Fr Joseph will be able to attend the 1916 Rising commemorations next year because of a lack of mobility.

For the Capuchin friars of Church Street the Rising began with an explosion.

“Frs Columbus and Aloysius both have the same memory of the morning of Easter Monday 1916,” says Fr Bryan Shortall OFM Cap of two of his famous predecessors.

“There was an explosion, a bang, outside the church on Church Street,” he says, when the friars “were having dinner, just finishing their midday meal which was at twelve o’clock because they got up so early. They went outside and they noticed that there was a child who they called ‘Baby Foster’ in his pram, killed, and that was the first casualty and the first child killed in the Rising.”

Despite his nickname, Sean Foster wasn’t quite a baby, but a toddler, just two months shy of his third birthday. His mother Katie had been wheeling him with his little brother Terence in their pram to the Capuchin’s Father Mathew Hall, where Katie was a member of the choral society and was planning on helping with the annual Father Mathew Feis. 

On the way there she passed a group of Volunteers behind a makeshift barricade at the junction on Church Street and North King Street, and spotting her brother among them teased him for “playing soldiers”, saying he should go home as he was “only fooling around”. 

Ammunition

Hardly had she said this when a group of British Lancers passed by, escorting several lorry-loads of ammunition to the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park. 

The Volunteers fired on the convoy as it passed Church Street Bridge, as Katie raced towards the Church hall, only to be caught in a crossfire with Sean being hit under his left ear by a bullet Katie would always maintain had come from a Volunteer’s pistol.

“So began a chaotic week in the city and in the life of the priests,” says Fr Bryan, explaining that this was the last thing the friars had expected. “Columbus talks about how Easter Monday dawned crisp and bright,” he says. “You’ve got to remember that they’d just had three of their busiest days with the Easter Triduum – they were flat out and Monday was a bank holiday. It was a different time – Sunday and Monday, nothing was open. “

There were five priests active in the Church Street community at the time, Fr Bryan explains: Fr Aloysius Travers, Fr Albert Bibby, Fr Sebastian O’Brien, Fr Columbus Murphy and Fr Augustine Hayden. The provincial of the Capuchins’ Irish province would have lived in the house at the same time, he explains, but his life was quite separate from that of the regular men. 

“Reading Columbus’ memoir it was chaotic,” he says, continuing, “I mean the men took their life in their hands. At one stage, Columbus says in his memoir that he wasn’t actually afraid if he died.  He talks about going down to Jervis Street Hospital where he was supplying, saying Mass for the nuns, early in the morning. 

“He describes himself dodging bullets and taking shelter in doorways, and describes very powerfully the destruction of the city stage by stage from his vantage point in Jervis Street Hospital where he holed himself up with everybody else including nurses for a few days because it was too dangerous to go out onto the streets.”

Fr Columbus’ descriptions of the executions are “sort of surreal”, Fr Bryan says. “The men don’t seem to be afraid, they tell them they’re not afraid, and the conversation between the men and the soldiers, the soldiers and the priests, the priests and the men, and so on. 

“Two soldiers come to either side of the men and bring them to the ante-chamber where they’re blindfolded and where a white card is put across their hearts, then they’re brought out into the stonebreakers’ yard where the two soldiers step aside, the firing squad fire, and as Columbus says, the men fall down in a heap.”

The friars, he says, would be driven from the priory in the dead of night in order to hear the men’s Confessions and give them Holy Communion and the Last Rites before being driven back to the priory for five or six in the morning, there to say Mass for the souls of the dead rebels. 

“Columbus blew me away with this statement when he said ‘And then I was to go up to Dundalk where I was to give a two-week mission’,” Fr Bryan remarks. “So going from this week of chaos, of bloodshed, of high drama and traumatic stress up to a rural parish to give a two-week mission – and we think in an era of counselling and psychotherapy and in an era of supervision for ministry, how did he stay sane? How did these men stay sane?

“I actually spoke to a counsellor about this,” he continues, “to a priest who is skilled in counselling, and he said that that kind of ministry – that kind of counselling – wasn’t around then, but they were men who were single-minded in their decisions for the salvation of souls. They were men who were single-minded about doing as much as they could and more than they could to minister to these men and to their families.”

The salvation of souls was the absolute number one priority for the friars, he explains, adding that Dublin’s secular clergy would have had the same concerns and the same determination to bring pastoral care and the sacraments to the injured and dying.

“Columbus Murphy’s memoir shows that first and foremost they were really pastors of souls,” he says. “They really cared for the fellows’ souls – they didn’t want them to go to Hell. That was the kind of the theology of the day: it was Heaven or Hell, or a long, long term in Purgatory, so they were really interested in saving these guys’ souls, making sure that they died with the priest, making sure they died in the favour of God with forgiveness and the oil of anointing on their bodies.”

Describing how the priests ministered not just to the rebels but to their families, he says during the Rising, “the priests met great faith in people, and shared in the belief that they were there to save souls but that in doing that, built into it was pastoral care”. Nowadays pastoral care tends to entail being a “listening ear” and a “shoulder to cry on”, he says, but “a hundred years ago it was a bit more stoic than that”.

Recalling how at the launch of his book Children of the Rising Joe Duffy described Dublin during the Rising as a city “a hundred years and a million miles away from us”, Fr Bryan observes how much smaller and slower things were in 1916.  “That world is a completely different world to the world we live in today.”

The bare bones of the 1916 story can be simply told. Unionist opposition to the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill in 1912 led to the signing of the Ulster Covenant by almost half a million unionists and the January 1913 formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), willing, if necessary, to take up arms against the Crown to remain part of a United Kingdom governed wholly from London.

The Irish Citizen Army (ICA) was formed that September to protect striking workers in Dublin’s ‘Lockout’. In November 1913, the publication of Eoin MacNeill’s ‘The North Began’ in the Gaelic League’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis led Bulmer Hobson of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) to persuade MacNeill to chair a committee to coordinate the formation of another militia to balance the unionist army.

The Irish Volunteer Force (IVF) was established on November 25 where the Garden of Remembrance currently stands. Supposedly intended to counterbalance the UVF and pressurise London into implementing home rule, its command structure was infiltrated from the start by hardline republicans with rather different aims. March 1914’s ‘Curragh Mutiny’ saw British officers threatening to resign rather than act against the unionist militia, and as the Home Rule bill was passed in May 1914, Ireland stood in danger of civil war.

Great War

The outbreak of the Great War appeared to solve that problem. Home rule’s introduction was postponed until the guns would fall silent in Europe, and with the unionist militia and all bar 10,000 nationalist Volunteers joining the British army, the IRB believed the time was ripe to rise against Britain. 

Plans were made over the following months and in August 1915 the barrister-turned-teacher Patrick Pearse, an erstwhile home ruler who had been sworn into the IRB after gradually losing faith in the likelihood of home rule being implemented, pointed to a coming rebellion in a stirring funeral oration for the IRB’s Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa.

ICA head James Connolly joined the IRB military council in January 1916, and although plans for German assistance ultimately came to nothing, the IRB leaders presented MacNeill with a forged letter claiming that the British were to arrest him and other Volunteer leaders. 

He agreed to a rebellion on Easter Sunday, but on hearing of the failure to land German arms and the capture of Sir Roger Casement, who had been liaising with the Germans on behalf of the IRB, issued an order on Saturday evening to countermand the following day’s manoeuvres.

Fresh orders

The IRB council rescheduled the Rising for the next day, April 24, and issued fresh orders. Roughly 1,200 Volunteers and ICA members assembled on Monday and took over a series of strategic points in Dublin, with Pearse declaring a Republic from the rebel headquarters at the General Post Office.  

Martial law was proclaimed on Tuesday, as British reinforcements began to arrive, and on Wednesday the HMS Helga and 18-pound guns at Tara Street began shelling Liberty Hall. Direct shelling of the GPO began on Friday and by evening the rebels withdrew to a new headquarters on Moore Street. 

On Saturday, after saying a final Rosary, they surrendered in order to prevent further “slaughter” of Dublin’s citizens, 184 of whom had already been killed in the fighting. Other rebel positions surrendered on Sunday April 30, and the rebels were imprisoned, mostly in Richmond Barracks. 

Over the next two weeks, 14 prominent rebels were executed at Kilmainham Jail, with Tom Kent being shot in Cork on May 9. Roger Casement was hanged for treason on August 3.

Noelle Dowling

Msgr Michael Curran, secretary to Dublin’s Archbishop William Walsh, notes in several places that the archbishop’s health began to fail in spring of 1916 and this left him incapacitate for long periods of time.

On Easter Sunday, April 24 Eoin MacNeill’s order countermanding the Easter mobilisation appeared prominently in the Sunday Independent.  Msgr Curran informed the archbishop of the news and then proceeded to take copies of McNeill’s order and deliver them to priests in the areas where a mobilisation was meant to take place.

At around noon, on Easter Monday, Msgr Curran received a call from Seán T. O’Kelly asking to meet him in Rutland Square. Shortly after Count George Plunkett, father of Joseph Mary Plunkett, arrived to see the archbishop. He asked the monsignor to inform the archbishop that the Rising was about to take place. It was during this conversation that Msgr Curran received a phone call from Mr Stokes, a jeweller who rang to say the GPO had been seized by the Irish Volunteers.

Msgr Curran cycled into town and saw many Volunteers on the way in wearing their uniforms. The first person Msgr Curran saw in the GPO was James Connolly. He was wearing a uniform and had a Colt revolver and was shouting orders. Volunteers were breaking window panes. When Connolly saw Msgr Curran he told him all priests were free to pass.

Confession

Msgr Curran asked one of the Volunteers where Patrick Pearse was as he was well known to him. He described Pearse as “flushed but calm and authoritative”. He told him he had come down after seeing the archbishop and wondered if there was anything that he could do, but Pearse simply said “no, we are going to see it out”. Pearse said that some of the Volunteers may like to go to Confession and Msgr Curran arranged this with Fr O’Reilly and Fr Flanagan of the pro-cathedral.

He stayed in O’Connell Street until about 15.30 when a squadron of about 100 Lancers appeared from the Rotunda. Riding up Upper O’Connell Street in single file, the first one who passed the pillar was shot in the throat. A few minutes later several people ran over to Msgr Curran saying one of the soldiers was a Catholic and asked him to attend him. A miraculous medal hung around his neck, but at that time many English Protestant soldiers simply wore them as charms.

By 2pm the crowds had greatly increased. Looting had already started. The first victim was Noblett’s sweetshop. At first all the ringleaders were women then the boys started. Once the military left looting became more systematic.

A number of soldiers had taken up positions at various points along O’Connell Street. From time to time they sniped at Henry Street and the GPO area. Shots were returned from the Volunteers.  The crowds continued to grow.

Msgr Curran returned to Archbishop’s House and spoke to the archbishop about the recklessness of the people and told him that the women and children were the worst. He urged the archbishop to write a letter telling people to be sensible and stay away.

Everything seemed quiet from 10pm Easter Monday night until about 1am when firing recommenced towards Cabra and Glasnevin.

The telephone in Archbishop’s House was not cut off for several days so priests were able to ring up and give news from the various different localities. Some of the news received via telephone mentioned:

• St Stephen’s Green seized;
• Jacob’s factory seized (five Volunteers and a woman killed there);
• City Hall seized;
• South Dublin Union seized but as a small back door was left unguarded, the military got in and both sides entrenched on the grounds;
• The Mendicity Institute and Four Courts seized;
• Church Street barricaded;

At 9am on Easter Tuesday (April 25) Msgr Curran went to St Andrew’s, Westland Row and then back to O’Connell Street. The whole street was completely looted. The Volunteers now occupied many buildings. The military occupied Trinity College. The side streets leading to O’Connell Street were barricaded. Boland’s and Kennedy’s bakeries were still supplying bread.

The only newspaper printed arrived at 11.30am. It was a stop-press edition of The Irish Times saying stern measures would be taken to put down the insurrection and warning people not to frequent the streets nor assemble in crowds. The archbishop also wrote a circular to be placed in all churches and this notice was to be read at all Masses and at Devotions.

More information came via telephone:

• Volunteers who had been in the North Dublin Union had left;
• Volunteers had been driven out of St Stephen’s Green by bombs and many lost their lives. The survivors ran to the College of Surgeons.

On Wednesday, April 26 the archbishop was able to leave his bedroom and go as far as the drawing room for the first time since April 1. At 7.45am sniping and machine guns started on the quays. At 8am, the Helga, which was in front of the Customs House, battered at Liberty Hall for 12 minutes. There was lots of sniping all day and a large number of civilians were killed and wounded. There were 90 such cases in Jervis Street Hospital alone. Looting had started in Henry Street and Mary Street.

At 9am Msgr Curran went to the pro-cathedral, the streets were still crowded and Dorset Street was now occupied by military sentries. 

The Volunteers still held the Four Courts and the area around Church Street.  

On Thursday, April 27 at 8.30am, Msgr Curran again went to the pro-cathedral. A proclamation had been issued ordering people off the streets between the hours of 7.30pm and 5am. There were very few on O’Connell Street and there was continuous sniping all along it. Several looters, mainly women and children had been killed.

From 11am, fierce rifle fire took place in Drumcondra. The priests in Archbishop’s House counted several bullets singing by the gate lodge and the house. Later one struck the house, more and more bullets flew outside piercing the east window of the billiard room and deflected sharply to the left against an open bookcase, smashing the woodwork. 

After this Msgr Curran arranged for the archbishop to sleep on the north-side of the house and barricaded the windows with mattresses. Shots were fired later that night along Drumcondra Road from Tolka Bridge towards the canal. The priest secretaries in the house set up quarters on the lower ground floor corridor.

After 4pm, machine gun fire was fierce for a prolonged period. Just after 5pm, shelling of houses along O’Connell Street commenced. The military set fire to some buildings to burn out the Volunteers. The whole area seemed to be on fire. Even though martial law had been declared many people crowded the street after 7.30pm. The military had to drive them indoors by discharging rifle fire over their heads. 

Later that evening, Msgr Curran contacted the office of the Lord Lieutenant and requested that priests be placed on the same footing as medical practitioners who were allowed out during curfew. Permission never came.

By Friday morning, the fires still raged in O’Connell Street and Clery’s was now affected. Many more people had taken refuge in the pro-cathedral. Whole areas were without food – milk, butter, bread and meat. Only for flour, most people would have been very badly off.

By Saturday the scarcity of food had become a pressing problem. At 11am, Major Price rang Archbishop’s House to say the government was to issue a proclamation – offering terms of surrender to the Volunteers and asked if one of the clergy could convey this to them. The archbishop told him it was not necessary to ask as he knew they would do it if asked by the military. 

At 4pm Msgr Curran was in his study when the phone rang. A girl told him that the Sinn Feiners had surrendered. Msgr Curran told the archbishop and then he headed for the pro-cathedral. He went via Mountjoy Square and North Great George’s Street where there was an atmosphere of expectancy.

At the pro-cathedral he found Fr Bowden looking for food and bedding for those taking refuge there. Msgr Curran told him the archbishop had instructed that there was no obligation to hear Mass on the Sunday and no bells were to be rung.

Msgr Curran left by Cathedral Street where a dead civilian lay in a doorway. He came out onto O’Connell Street. There was not a soul on the street. The GPO was a shell and lower O’Connell Street was a smoking ruin. Clery’s was burnt out and the smell of burning material was everywhere. He started to head towards Henry Street and every footstep crunched on glass. He saw that Henry Street was blocked and started heading up towards the Rotunda. 

A group of military stood by the Parnell monument led by Colonel Portal and Msgr Curran explained he wanted to get to Jervis Street Hospital. The colonel told him of the surrender, signed by Pearse, and asked that it be made known. He didn’t have a spare copy to give him as he had only six left. He told the monsignor he would need a pass and he made one out for him. As he passed by every street and alley, military were seen behind sandbags with rifles aimed at Moore Street and Henry Street. Disarmament had not yet taken place. When he arrived at the hospital he met three of the priests from the pro-cathedral who advised him not to go back to Drumcondra.

Civilians

By Tuesday, May 2 all telephone communications to Archbishop’s House had been cut off. People were still moving about and the military were now turning their attention to the civilians and had started the arrests. Msgr Curran learned that Seán T. O’Kelly had been arrested. At 5pm, Fr Aloysius, the Capuchin, came to give information on the last stages of the fighting at the Four Courts, Jacobs and the South Dublin Union. He told the archbishop that General Maxwell was anxious to see him. The archbishop asked Msgr Curran to arrange an interview which took place the next day.

On May 3, Fr Edward Morrissey, chaplain to Kilmainham prison was present at the executions. He told Msgr Curran that Fr Aloysius and those who were there before his arrival were not allowed to stay.

Fr Francis Farrington, chaplain to Arbour Hill was present at the funerals of Pearse, McDonagh and Clarke who had been court-martialled and shot at 3.30am at Kilmainham. Their remains were swiftly brought to Arbour Hill. The military sent a lorry to Fr Farrington’s house in Aughrim Street at 3am and brought him back to the barracks. He described hearing the volley of shots at Kilmainham and the arrival of the remains in pools of blood, still warm and limp, eyes bandaged and mouths open. Fr Farrington read the burial rites at 4am and they were interned, uncoffined, in a trench, 60 feet long.

The same day, Sir John Maxwell along with his aide-de-camp, called to meet the archbishop. He spoke of the bravery of the Capuchins and mentioned a number of priests whom he accused of participating in the Rising. Maxwell wanted to deport them all immediately and was under the impression the archbishop could arrange this. 

On learning the names of the priests involved, the archbishop pointed out that he had no jurisdiction in the matter as no Dublin priests were on the list. He advised Maxwell to contact their bishops and noting the presence of two Limerick priests had a little malicious pleasure in anticipating the reply he would receive from Dr O’Dwyer!

Maxwell wrote to Bishop O’Dwyer on May 12 and requested that two of his priests, Fr Tom Wall and Fr Michael Hayes, be prevented from interacting with people. Dr O’Dwyer was not happy and wrote to Maxwell on May 17 saying that both men were excellent priests who held strong national views. He went on to say Maxwell’s conduct was “wantonly cruel and oppressive”. He had shot young men in cold blood and he regarded his actions with horror and he believed he had outraged the conscience of the country. 

He went further and charged him with deporting hundreds of thousands of young men without trial. He concluded “your regime had been one of the worst and blackest chapters in the history of the misgovernment of the country”. The letter became public and appeared in many newspapers both at home and abroad.

On May 4, four more men were shot and buried between 3am and 4am. Joseph Mary Plunkett was among them. He had married Grace Gifford shortly before his execution. The following day John McBride was executed.

On May 6, Fr Paddy Flanagan of Ringsend was arrested and sent to the Richmond Barracks (Cathal Brugha Barracks). Fr Mooney was detained as a prisoner, under armed guard, in his own house from noon until 6.30pm. He was only freed on the promise not to leave the place for three days. Fr Flanagan was released on May 9.

On May 13, the archbishop motored out for the first time to see the ruined streets.

On May 27, Mr Justice Sherman and Sir Mackenzie Chalmers called to see the archbishop. They were members of the Rebellion Inquiry Committee. The archbishop didn’t feel he had much to add as he had been an invalid for most of the conflict and was only slowly recovering from a prolonged illness. He ascribed the chief causes of the rebellion as the breakdown of the constitutional movement. 

He mentioned various defects of the Home Rule Bill and its plain misrepresentation by the Irish Party. He criticised particularly the clause which said that despite any act passed by the Irish parliament, the English parliament could remove it.

On June 6, the archbishop left the capital for Wicklow where he remained recuperating until September 5. The only time Dr Walsh left Wicklow was to visit Alice Stopford Green in Courtown when she was seeking his help in getting a reprieve for Roger Casement who ended up being executed on August 3, 1916.

Archbishop Walsh was seen as being silent for much of the Rising. The main reason was his health but he also knew many of the revolutionaries. Many of the men taking part were deeply religious. Dr Walsh believed that any Rising without outside help would be futile but not traitorous. He was never prepared to condemn the Rising publicly. He knew Irish history and its record of turning defeated patriots into posthumous heroes. He remembered how the Fenians had been denounced by the Church and the bitterness it had caused and of course he had experienced first-hand the reaction of people when he had spoken out against Parnell. 

He also knew if he condemned the Rising he would be seen as siding with the government and of being used by it. 

Executions

The execution of the leaders, day after day, along with prominent members of the Volunteers sickened most people. Even William Martin Murphy, who had significant property losses as a result of the Rising changed his tune when faced with Tories gloating over the executions and imprisonments. He stated “every drop of Catholic blood in his veins surged up and he began like others to pity the insurgents”.

By the end of 1916 hundreds of the prisoners had returned home with renewed determination, organisation and focus and to their surprise they discovered the country had changed too. The hostile, condemning groups had given way to warm and welcoming crowds, to bonfires and torch-lit processions. 

The aged and ailing archbishop was still revered for his nationalist reputation and he was still determined to make his presence felt right up to his death on April 9, 1921.

Noelle Dowling is Dublin Diocesan Archivist.

“There was no joking, not even the semblance of it. Poor Colbert was far too beautiful and too reverent a character to joke with anyone in such a solemn hour. I know very well where his heart was then. It was very near to God and to the friends he loved.

“What really happened was this. While my left arm linked the prisoner’s right, and while I was whispering something in his ear, a soldier approached to fit a bit of paper on his breast. While this was being done he looked down, and addressing the soldier in a perfectly cool and natural way said: ‘Wouldn’t it be better to pin it up higher – nearer the heart?’ The soldier said something in reply, and then added: ‘Give me your hand now.’ The prisoner seemed confused and extended his left hand. ‘Not that,’ said the soldier, ‘but the right.’ The right was accordingly extended, and having shaken it warmly, the kindly human-hearted soldier proceeded to bind gently the prisoner’s hands behind his back, and afterwards blindfolded him.

“Some minutes later, my arm still linked in his, and accompanied by another priest, we entered the dark corridor leading to the yard and his lips moving in prayer, the brave lad went forth to die.”

– Fr Augustine Hayden

 “Before leaving for Kilmainham, I had a few words with Connolly. I said that the men who would execute him were soldiers – probably they knew nothing about him, and, like soldiers, would simply obey orders and fire. I wanted him to feel no anger against them, but to say, as Our Blessed Lord said on Calvary: “Father, forgive them” and to say a prayer for them.

“I do, Father,” he answered. “I respect every man who does his duty.”

“James Connolly was laid on a stretcher and placed in an ambulance. I stayed beside him and had a last word with him before they took him from the ambulance in Kilmainham Yard. He was put sitting on a chair; the order was given and the soldiers fired. Fr Eugene McCarthy, who earlier had been in attendance on Sean MacDermott, went over and anointed Connolly.

“I had stood just behind the firing line. It was a scene I should not ask to witness again… Now I had to say goodbye. All I could do was to return to Church Street with a heavy heart and to offer the Holy Sacrifice for his soul. May he rest in peace.”

– Fr Aloysius Travers

“Chatting to pass the time, Father Albert mentioned to me that he was with my son, Joseph, just before he was executed. Of this I was not aware until then. He told me how four priests from Church Street were sent for in the early hours of the morning of May 4, 1916, and in 20 minutes the four had arrived at Kilmainham Jail to find Joseph and three others (Edward Daly, Willie Pearse and Michael O’Hanrahan) were about to be executed. 

“One priest and a prisoner were sent to a nearby cell. The prisoner had his hat on and the priest wondered to see a man going to confess and wearing his hat. A jailer put his head into the cell, and then entering, undid the handcuffs behind the man’s back and allowed him to remove his hat. It was nearly dark and there was only a candle for lighting.

“The other three prisoners were together in an adjoining room, among them Joseph, by whom Father Albert was attracted. Joseph, seeing him looking at him, walked across the room to Father Albert and said: ‘Father I want you to know that I am dying for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland.’ ‘That’s all right, my son,’ answered Father Albert. In a few minutes the firing squad carried out their orders. And that was Joseph’s first – and last – meeting with Fr Albert here on Earth, God grant they have met in Heaven.

– Countess Josephine Mary Plunkett

“I went to Seán Heuston’s cell at about 3.20 am… During the last quarter of an hour we knelt in that cell in complete darkness, as the little piece of candle had burned out, but no word of complaint escaped his lips. 

“His one thought was to prepare with all the fervour and earnestness of his soul to meet Our Divine Saviour and His Sweet Virgin Mother, to Whom he was about to offer up his young life for the freedom and independence of his beloved country.

“He had been to Confession and had received Holy Communion early that morning, and was not afraid to die. 

“He awaited the end not only with that calmness and fortitude which peace of mind brings to noble souls, but during the last quarter of an hour he spoke of soon meeting again Pádraig MacPiarais and the other leaders who had already gone before him. 

••••••••

“I scarcely had moved a few yards when a volley went off, and this noble soldier of Irish freedom fell dead. I rushed over to anoint him. His whole face seemed transformed, and lit up with a grandeur and brightness that I had never before noticed.”

– Fr Albert Bibby

“After I had left Willie Pearse I saw O’Hanrahan for a short while in his cell… His last message to me before he went out into the dark corridor that led to the yard where he was shot was: ‘Father, I’d like [it if] you saw my mother and sisters and consoled them.’ I promised him I would, and, whispering something in his ear, I grasped the hands that were tied behind his back. In his right hand he pressed mine most warmly; we exchanged a look, and he went forth to die.”

– Fr Augustine Hayden

Personal recollections by Fr Aloysius, as published in the 1966 Capuchin Annual

Easter Monday, April 24, 1916

Said Mass inGloucester Street Convent at 8.30. On way to convent noticed some Fianna scouts on bicycles. Passing up Gloucester Street near the convent PH Pearse and another Volunteer (I have since been told he was Willie Pearse) rode past me on bicycles. Pearse did not see me. He seemed in a hurry to gain some objective. 

He wore a loose overcoat or mackintosh, which covered baggage or provisions. He and his companion had come into Gloucester Street from Rutland Square.

We were at dinner when we heard the rifle fire and soon word came that Mrs Foster’s little boy had  been shot outside the Father Mathew Hall; and shortly afterwards a man wounded in the hand was brought into the convent and a number of children, crying, came for shelter. 

By one o’clock or one thirty the Volunteers had barricades erected in Church Street and were at their posts.

Tuesday, April 25

The Father Mathew Hall was taken over as a hospital by the Volunteers; and the wounded received First Aid from the members of Cumann na mBan. Serious cases were at the earliest opportunity conveyed to Richmond Hospital. Some of the Fathers were constantly in or near the hall, at call in case of emergency.

Wednesday, April 26

Visited theRichmond Hospital and the Union; and returning, heard Confessions in the house in North Brunswick Street adjoining Moore’s coach factory. The Volunteers had possession of the houses in Church Street, and had established communications between them. 

The windows were protected with sandbags, behind which the Volunteers were in position. The wildest rumours were in circulation, e.g. that the Germans had landed outside Dublin and were marching on the city.

Thursday, April 27

Firing – rifle volleysand machine gun fire – at intervals. Fires at, as far as could be judged, the Post Office, Clery’s etc., in O’Connell Street. A number of wounded were in the Main Hall (Father Mathew Hall). Some prisoners were there also, including a DMP and soldiers from Linenhall Barracks. The soldiers worked at filling sandbags for the barricades.

Friday, April 28

Machine guns and hand grenades. There seemed to be a great deal of firing at sea. Could hear the heavy boom of cannon. Perhaps the firing was for fog signals. Food was getting scarce. Almost impossible to get milk. All through, the Volunteers did their best to facilitate the bringing up of provisions. 

Friday night and Saturday, April 29

From aboutten o’clock the firing became intense; and all night and all through Saturday until about three or four in the afternoon there was no cessation. 

Machine guns, bombs, hand grenades and rifles were in continuous use. Great fires blazed in O’Connell Street direction as well as at Linenhall Barracks. A great number of wounded were attended in the Father Mathew Hall.

Sunday, April 30

After Mass (said about 7am) Fr Augustine and myself walked to the Castle to seek a permit to see Pearse. We saw Brig. Gen. Lowe. He received us in a very kindly and gentlemanly manner, and gave us the permit. He suggested that we should see Connolly, also, as he was responsible for the Citizen Army; and he took us to the room in the Castle hospital where Connolly was a patient. 

He asked Connolly in our presence if his signature to the letter advising surrender was genuine. His reply, was: “Yes – to prevent needless slaughter.” He added, however that he spoke only for his own men.

The General then put his motor and chauffeur at our disposal, to take us to Arbour Hill to see Pearse, and suggested that after seeing him and arranging with the Church Street Volunteers we should return and convey the message to Jacob’s factory where the Volunteers were still holding out and to which he had been unable to convey Pearse’s message. He said that it would be a great charity to do this as otherwise great loss of life would ensue.

Father Augustine occupied the interior of the motor. I sat with the chauffeur outside, as protection for him through the Volunteer districts.

When we reached Arbour Hill, Pearse informed us that the signature was genuine and given to prevent needless bloodshed. 

Monday, May 1

I enteredwith Captain Stanley, but I remarked that two soldiers with rifles and bayonets were on guard and showed no intention of leaving. I point out this to Captain Stanley, but he said it was necessary that they should remain; that he had no power to remove them. 

Then I said: “If that is so I cannot do my work as a priest. I have never before, to my knowledge spoken to James Connolly. I cannot say if he may not be hard of hearing. Confession is an important and sacred duty that demands privacy and I cannot go on with it in the presence of these men.”

I had given my word that I would not utilise the opportunity for carrying political information or as a cover for political designs, and if my word was not sufficient or reliable they had better get some other priest. But I felt quite confident I would have my way. 

•••••••

The permit “to pass through the streets of Dublin by day or night” was signed by Lord Powerscourt. Referring in my presence to the events of the preceding days, Lord Powerscourt and some officers paid a tribute to the bravery of the Volunteers, one of the officers remarking that “they were the cleanest and bravest lot of boys he had ever met”.

Tuesday, May 2

When I reached Kilmainham Gaol I was informed that Thomas MacDonagh also wished for my ministrations. I was taken to the prisoners’ cells and spent some hours between the two. “You will be glad to know that I gave Holy Communion to James Connolly this morning,” I said to Pearse when I met him. “Thank God,” he replied, “it is the one thing I was anxious about.”

••••••••

Then I heard the Confessions and gave Holy Communion to Pearse and MacDonagh; and I cannot easily forget the devotion with which they received the Most Blessed Sacrament. They assured me they were happy. They spent the time at their disposal in prayer.

 I told them I should be very near at the last moments, although they would probably be blindfolded and unable to see me and I exhorted them to make aspirations and acts of contrition and love. I left them in a most edifying disposition sometime between 2am and 3am.

To my astonishment I heard that orders were given that all the friends were to leave the prison and that the orders referred to me, too. I protested that I was present not merely as a friend but in the capacity of a priest, and held that I should be permitted to remain with the prisoners to the end. The officer in charge said that he had to carry out his instructions. 

Wednesday, May 3

I went to Mrs MacDonagh and Mrs Pearse to break the sad news to them. I told Mrs Pearse that I believed Willie would be spared; that I could not conceive of them executing her second son. “No,” she said, “I believe they will put him to death too.”

Friday, May 5

John McBrideexecuted, attended by one of the Fathers.

Sunday, May 7

Consultation withJohn Dillon at North Great George’s Street. Dillon said that although he disagreed entirely with the policy of the men and believed that they had put back the Home Rule Movement, still he admired their courage and respected their convictions. 

He said that he had always had an admiration for Patrick Pearse. He would do everything in his power to put an end to the executions.