Out of Africa: oral histories of overseas volunteering in education, c. 1950–2010

ABSTRACT

This article examines the lived experiences of teachers who were either lay volunteers or Sister missionaries, working in education and health care. The research draws on oral histories, examining the responses of participants under a series of thematic headings that unpack the influence of family life, schooling and faith, while also exploring experience ‘in the field’. The article attempts to compare the responses of lay women with Sisters (also sometimes known as nuns, or women religious), and finds that there were some factors that distinguished between the experiences of these two cohorts involved in voluntary work in education and health care in African countries, in the period under review.

KEYWORDS:

• Oral history
• missionary
• volunteer
• Africa
• education

Introduction

Our focus in this article is on women who worked in Zambia, Nigeria and Malawi, between the 1950s and 2015.¹ Some of the women were what are generally known as ‘volunteers’, and their overseas service was undertaken in collaboration with different NGOs and charitable organisations. Others were members of Catholic religious orders of Sisters, and their overseas work was undertaken as part of fulfilling their responsibilities within the religious congregation to which they belonged. To distinguish between the two cohorts, we refer to the first group as lay volunteers, and the second as missionary Sisters. One of our overriding questions was: did the motivations and experiences of teachers who were lay volunteers differ from those who were missionary Sisters? The article discusses the methodology adopted, and provides a discussion and analysis of the data that were gathered.

Historiography

This overview of research on the emergence of the modern Irish missionary movement and the evolution of lay volunteering in Ireland in the twentieth century indicates ways in which such movements relate to wider social change. Thus, within the limits of space, we engage briefly with the historiography of the Catholic Church, Propaganda Fide and global education, and we then focus in greater detail on scholarship on the role and work of women religious and lay volunteers.

The church body responsible for Catholic missionaries, both lay and religious, is the Sacred Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, or de Propaganda Fide.² Mann Wall notes that in 1939, three million Irish Catholics provided one-twelfth of all Catholic missionaries in territories dependent on Propaganda Fide.³ By 1957, Ireland had more missionary sisters in the field in Africa than any other European country.⁴ According to Hogan, by 1982 Ireland had a total of 5613 religious in 86 countries, which on a per capita basis, put Ireland in the top tier of Catholic nations engaged in foreign missions.⁵

The history of the Irish missionary movement provides a backdrop for this study of missionaries and volunteers. Following the repeal of the Penal Laws and Catholic Emancipation (1829), the Catholic Church gradually re-established itself to a position of authority in Ireland. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a rapid and significant growth in Catholic religious orders, which sent women and men to serve the Irish diaspora, especially in North America and Australia. By the early 1900s, such missions were self-sufficient and after centuries of oppression and disorganisation the Church was unified and confident enough to venture into non-Christian missions. A strong indigenous missionary movement was born. From 1908, Propaganda Fide declared that the United States was no longer a mission territory.⁶ Nuns and priests who typically missioned to the Irish diaspora now found themselves bound for non-Christian territories in parts of Africa and China. In 1920, Fr Edward Galvin and Fr John Blowick, together with 16 missionary priests, travelled to the Hangyang area on the Yangtze River. Education was the greatest need, and the Christian Brothers and Loreto Sisters were invited to set up schools.⁷ The mission was short-lived, due to social and political disruption, but provided the impetus for further work. The Maynooth Mission to China was renamed St Columban’s Foreign Mission Society, and the Missionary Sisters of St Columban were founded in 1922 to serve with the priests. Historians such as Hogan and McGlade argue that the Maynooth Mission to China marked the beginning of the modern Irish missionary movement.

Prior to the founding of these indigenous Irish mission orders, French missionary congregations such as the Holy Ghost Fathers (CSSp),⁸ the Society of African Missions (SMA) and the Society of the Missionaries of Africa (also known as the White Fathers) were pivotal in promoting non-Christian missions in Ireland.⁹ These orders sought Irish clergy for the English-speaking territories in British Africa and prominent Irish missionaries were members of the congregations. Their priests engineered recruitment drives in the seminaries of Maynooth and All Hallows. Fr Joseph Shanahan, an Irish-born Holy Ghost priest, was based in Nigeria from 1902 to run the Holy Ghost mission, ministering to the ‘most abandoned souls’.¹⁰ Shanahan became a prominent figure in the Irish missionary movement, focusing his efforts with the Igbo tribe in south-east Nigeria. His apostolate with the Igbo initiated a relationship between Ireland and Nigeria which lasted until the late twentieth century. Shanahan established Nigeria as the ‘showpiece of Ireland’s Spiritual Empire’ and he was the first to draw parallels between the Irish and an African nation.¹¹ Founding members of some of these Orders served as lay volunteers on Shanahan’s mission in Nigeria.

One of these founding women was Agnes Ryan (later Mother Therese), a midwife and medical student who volunteered with Shanahan’s Igbo outreach and was a founding member of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary (MSHR).¹² From 1924, the MSHR taught in local schools and performed social services with Igbo women, later expanding into medical care. The second woman, Marie Martin, a wartime Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, also served as a lay missionary, teaching on Shanahan’s mission for two years.¹³ Martin became convinced of the need for a congregation of nuns who would dedicate themselves fully to a medical apostolate and established the Medical Missionaries of Mary (MMM) in 1937. The MMM were the first Irish missionary society to be instituted exclusively for medical purposes. Until 1936, Canon Law prohibited the practice of medicine and midwifery by nuns.¹⁴ Scholars have examined the ideological basis for this canonical legislation. It was considered by the Church that such work posed a threat to the purity of religious life, and that it was at odds with the vows of chastity and obedience taken by Sisters. Martin anticipated future change and set about establishing her medical missionary order before the sanction was lifted. The challenges that Martin faced have been examined by Mann Wall, Manton, Veale and Purcell.¹⁵

After much campaigning, Propaganda Fide issued a decree, Constans Ac Sedula (1936), which reversed the ban on Sisters practising medicine and midwifery. The decree addressed the need for Catholic female missionaries to train as nurses, midwives and doctors in order to tend to the mother and child in missionary territories.¹⁶ Constans Ac Sedula had a profound impact on Irish women who sought to blend medical missionary aspirations with a vocation to religious life. The lifting of the ban allowed both the MMM and MSHR to expand and grow their work, first in Nigeria and later around the world. These orders ran hospitals and ‘bush’ clinics, operated maternal and child-care centres, recruited women for religious congregations, and educated women in schools of nursing. From 1928 to 1967 in Nigeria alone, the MSHR ran eight general hospitals, two nurse training schools, 38 rural maternity homes, and several dispensaries.¹⁷ By 1968, the MMM in Nigeria were running nine general and maternity hospitals, two children’s hospitals, four clinics, 11 outstations, three leprosy settlements, three orphanages, two schools of nursing and five hospitals approved for Grade 1 midwifery training.¹⁸ These orders were soon joined by other missionary societies.

Medical missionaries are most often criticised as being animated by an imperialist agenda, which allowed them to undermine indigenous medicine, replacing it with western medical thinking and practices. To explore the accuracy of this claim, Veale investigated the MMM’s unique blend of maternal medicine. She found that while it incorporated western/Irish medical knowledge and Catholic moral doctrine, it also reflected the demands of local women. In this way, the MMM medical practice was ‘refashioned within the context of the missions’.¹⁹ Mann Wall argues that, following the Second Vatican Council, Catholic missions were transformed in terms of personnel and procedures as they opened up to other cultural practices. The documents of the Council highlighted that much of what Sisters thought was the natural way of doing things was actually culturally constructed. The Sisters began to question their previous assumptions and grew more receptive to African culture, including indigenous healers.²⁰ The findings in this article support the claims of Veale and Mann Wall concerning medical missionaries.

From the second half of the nineteenth century, there was also a growth in the number of Orders of teaching missionaries. Presentation, Loreto, Dominican and Mercy orders were all active in Ireland in the provision of schooling. Unsurprisingly, their overseas missions focused on the same work, although the Mercy Sisters – and to a lesser degree the Loretos – were also involved in health care. As Richard Quinn notes, by 1968 the number of primary students enrolled in Irish missionary schools in the Global South exceeded the total number of students enrolled in all educational institutions in Ireland for the same year.²¹ Some insight into how Sisters experienced teaching in missionary schools can be gleaned from the work of Humphreys, McKenna and KilBride.²² However, as will be argued below, the need for scholars to undertake oral histories of Irish women religious in the mission field is urgent, especially in light of the fact that this is an ageing population. Though some documentary accounts of missionary activity exist, they have drawn mainly on archival sources, rather than adopting an oral history approach.

One of the earliest accounts of Irish missionary work was McGlade’s 1967 publication, The Missions: Africa and the Orient. McGlade acknowledges the gendered nature of this in his own work, stating: ‘In the consideration of mission work in Africa thus far, the emphasis has been on the work of Irish priests. Incidental mention of sisters and brothers was made occasionally.’²³ McGlade notes that, unlike priests, Irish sisters were scattered throughout the missionary world. However, he reduced them to a form of helpmeet to men: ‘Priests in pagan countries find their apostolate quite limited unless they have the co-operation of women religious.’²⁴ A more substantial contribution to Irish mission history is Hogan’s The Irish Mission Movement: A Historical Survey 1830–1980. Hogan presents a background to the movement and describes the efforts of the main missionary groups until 1980. However, like McGlade, Hogan gives little attention to women religious. He acknowledges that the work of missionary nuns ‘constitutes the most impressive example of successful involvement by Irish religious among non-Christians’,²⁵ yet his book gives more attention to the failures of priests than the successes of Sisters. A mission is seen as a ‘failure’ if the clergy failed, regardless of how successful the mission was for Sisters.

Murphy’s A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education is an extensive account of Irish overseas education from the sixth to the twentieth century. Murphy acknowledged the initiatives of missionary nuns throughout the book, but gave greater attention to the achievements of men.²⁶ One of the most comprehensive scholarly works on women religious and the missions is McKenna’s Made Holy: Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad.²⁷ McKenna concerned herself with the life histories of 30 Irish nuns who lived part, or all, of their religious lives outside their homeland, in some form of mission activity. Through oral history, she investigates themes such as national identity, Irish Catholicism, womanhood, religious formation, migration and the lived experience of the Second Vatican Council. Her work is a valuable resource for scholars and historians alike. Raftery’s work has also considered the contribution and experience of Irish nuns in the provision of mission education,²⁸ while Manton has traced the collaborations forged between Irish missionaries, Irish lay doctors and the colonial government in the provision of leprosy control measures in south-east Nigeria.²⁹ Mann Wall, as already noted, has utilised case studies of Irish and American female mission orders to challenge imperial interpretations of missionary medicine and examine how women in a transnational church became potent actors in health care at both the local and global levels.³⁰ Religious women, to borrow a phrase from McKenna, are no longer ‘curiously ignored’,³¹ yet further diverse scholarly work could do much to represent their voice.

Some scholars see the missionary impulse as a form of colonisation, whereby ‘white Christians’ settled among the indigenous people of an area, and established control over them. Historians, anthropologists and social scientists have argued that missionaries imposed their beliefs and practices on disadvantaged peoples, and in so doing exploited local weaknesses, destroyed indigenous culture and established control over the host community. Hogan, Coogan, Bateman, Murphy and Linehan address claims of colonialism and imperialism in the Irish mission context. Hogan states: ‘Accusations of cultural ignorance, religious imperialism and collusion in colonial exploitation have always been placed at the door of missionaries and the Irish movement has not escaped.’³² Coogan argues: ‘The Irish got to Africa the same way they did every other place in the world, under the British Empire: as soldiers, administrators, traders, professionals and in particular as missionaries.’³³ Bateman examines Irish missionary magazines and texts, and analyses the influence of ‘propaganda literature’ on the spread of Ireland’s ‘Spiritual Empire’.³⁴ She argues that the early publications used imperialist discourse to depict missionary priests as masculine figures who were civilising the darkest corners of Africa.³⁵ In his critical analysis of early Irish mission enterprises, Denis Linehan investigates the image of Africa constructed by Irish missionaries.³⁶ According to Linehan, examination of mission materials ‘offers critical insights into the complexities and dramas of Irishness in the dynamics of the post-colony’, highlighting that ‘it was not possible for the Irish Catholic missionary organisations to escape the orbit of imperial representations’.³⁷ Murphy, however, disputes this notion of the Irish missionaries as neo-colonists and affirms: ‘In the case of Irish missionaries coming from a country with a deep and bitter anti-colonial culture this whole argument seems particularly perverse.’³⁸ As will be seen, the question of ‘Irishness’ and the contested understanding of the purpose of ‘mission’ were common to the contributions of several of the participants discussed in this article.

The evolution of lay volunteering has attracted the attention of scholars, though there is a much smaller literature on Irish volunteers than on the missionary movement. The relative newness of relevant non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and faith-based organisations (FBOs), and the limited access to their records under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), challenge the historian. The emergence of NGOs and FBOs is, nonetheless, contextualised and examined in the work of Martens, Berger and Brass et al.³⁹ O’Brien has contributed to the literature in his study of Ireland and government aid, and O’Sullivan has examined the emergence of the state of Biafra in Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire.⁴⁰ Farmar has provided a study of the organisation known as Concern.⁴¹ Both Staunton and Bateman have examined Ireland, Biafra and conflict. Bateman argues that the Biafran crisis reshaped Ireland’s relationship with the ‘Third World’.⁴² Where once it had been defined through the expansion of the Spiritual Empire and school, church and hospital building campaigns run by missionaries, the rise of NGOs changed this.⁴³ There has been no attempt to capture the voices of Irish lay women who have worked with NGOs and FBOs, and this research attempts to draw attention to the need for such work, while adding the voices of some women volunteers.

Approach and methodology

This article is concerned with oral histories that add to the understanding of Irish women – missionary nuns and lay women volunteers – who worked in education and health care. An oral history approach was used, whereby a sample of women were interviewed, the recorded interviews were transcribed and thematic analysis was used in order to discuss the stories recounted.

Before looking at some of the findings, it is useful to consider the approaches used by historians of education who undertake oral history projects. Generally, in adopting an approach that attempts to capture some of the life history of participants, the historian of education privileges the subjective voice of the respondents, and creates a space for their unique narrative. Recording someone’s ‘life story’, and doing the kind of work that adds a second layer and a further interpretation, creates a ‘life history’.⁴⁴ As Ivor Goodson and Pat Sikes have noted, ‘life historians believe that the stories people tell about their lives can give important insights’ into historical social contexts and events.⁴⁵ While oral history has many similarities to life history, it can be limited to an interview that covers one or two main themes, to provide the historian with new sources that illuminate an area of historical enquiry.

The oral history approach has developed significantly over the past two decades, and nuance and understanding has been added through the work of scholars who have interviewed people who have worked in conflict situations, in the area of reconciliation, in human rights work and in research with indigenous groups.⁴⁶ Pedagogical approaches to oral history in schools and the use of oral histories in teacher education continue to be valued by historians of education.⁴⁷ The work of Cunningham and Gardner has indicated that there is much scope for oral histories of the teaching profession.⁴⁸ We argue that oral histories of professionals in cognate areas of work, such as that of missionaries and volunteers, is urgently needed. The urgency becomes clear below when we note the age of retired missionaries.

In this study, our focus was on a series of thematic areas that charted the professional lives of the participants. A sample of participants was recruited through convenience sampling and snowballing. These were deemed the appropriate recruitment methods, for several reasons. First, the number of retired Irish women volunteers and missionary Sisters available for recruitment to such a project is naturally small, as many have died and many are no longer physically and mentally able to participate in such a project. Additionally, data protection legislation does not allow researchers to have access to lists of names of members of congregations, or of organisations for overseas volunteers. Participants were therefore sought via agencies and religious orders, which could facilitate access to their members by sharing an open invitation to participate. By the additional use of the ‘snowballing’ technique, whereby participants suggested friends and extended the invitation, more participants were recruited to the project.

A set of questions addressed areas including the childhood and schooling of the participants, their education and training, and several questions that probed their work as volunteers or missionary Sisters. The questions were to be used in order to give a loose shape to the interview process, and to serve as prompts, rather than to create a rigid dynamic. Because the sample includes older women, it was necessary for the project to undergo a full ethical review. This process included providing the university ethics committee with a detailed plan concerning all elements of the pre- and post-interview stages, and a plan for archiving the data.

Location of placements

The 20 Irish women who were interviewed for this article missioned or volunteered in various countries in Africa. None of the women taught or cared for white settlers or white missionary families. Kenya and Uganda were the countries common to several missionaries and volunteers: seven women worked in Kenya, and seven went to Uganda; some worked in a few locations over a long period. For example, over a 60-year period, Sr Eileen worked in Uganda, Zimbabwe and South Africa; Sr Nora spent 36 years missioned across Tanzania, South Africa and Malawi.

Historically, the geographical focus of Ireland’s bilateral aid was on a small number of low-income sub-Saharan African countries. The sectoral focus was on agriculture, rural development, health and education.⁴⁹ The priority states had administrative structures similar to Ireland, derived from a common experience of colonial rule; they were countries that were small, peaceful and recently independent; they were English-speaking, and represented business interests; finally, all had an established Irish missionary presence.⁵⁰ Amongst the nuns, the longest service overseas was 60 years and the shortest was nine years (see Table 1). Their average mission service lasted 38.5 years. Family, career and financial commitments meant that the lay volunteers completed shorter placements. The longest overseas service for a lay volunteer was 20 years, the shortest was five years, and their average overseas volunteer service was approximately nine years (see Table 2).

Table 1. Biographical details of missionary Sisters

Name	Year born	Age	First departed in	Age at dep.	Duration overseas (years)	Role
Sr Imelda	1934	83	1952	18	54	Education
Sr Lilian	1933	84	1956	23	44	Education
Sr Patricia	1930	87	1957	37	43	Education
Sr Phyllis	1940	77	1960	20	44	Education
Sr Suzanne	1947	70	1971	24	44	Education
Sr Bríd	1939	78	1970	31	28	Health
Sr Kathleen	1936	80	1975	39	21	Education
Sr Gabriel	1937	79	1993	56	9	Health
Sr Nora	1949	68	1977	28	36	Health
Sr Teresa	1933	84	1964	31	39	Health
Sr Eileen	1930	87	1954	24	60	Education
Sr Margaret	1936	81	1969	33	49+	Health
Sr Marian	1934	83	1964	30	51	Health
Sr May	1934	83	1969	35	29	Health

Note: here and in Table 2, ‘+’ sign next to duration overseas indicates that the participant was on active service at the time of interview and planned to remain overseas for the foreseeable future.

Table 2. Biographical details of lay volunteers

Name	Born	Age	First departed in	Age at dep.	Faith- based or secular	Duration overseas (years)	Role
Ann	1935	83	1969	34	Faith-based	20	Education
Barbara	1963	55	1994	31	Faith-based	6	Health
Colette	1951	66	2011	60	Secular	5	Education
Emma	1947	70	2009	65	Faith-based	8+	Education
Joanne	1955	63	2009	54	Faith-based	6	Education
Kate	1944	74	2010	66	Faith-based	7+	Health
Rachel	1948	69	1993	45	Secular	8	Health
Sandra	1948	69	1972	24	Faith-based	10	Education

Terminology

During some of the period under review, the term used to refer to the host countries in which the participants missioned or volunteered was ‘Third World’. A revision of the terminology that is used to distinguish between wealthier and poorer countries has resulted in newer terms such as ‘Developing World’, ‘Global South’ or ‘Majority World’. A binary view of the world in which categories rest upon simple essentialised dualisms is, according to David Lewis, ‘overly simplistic and unhelpfully ideological’.⁵¹ Whilst poverty, inequality and exclusion remain disproportionately concentrated within the so-called ‘Developing World’, the changing global conditions of the twenty-first century have made binary distinctions at global level less sustainable. Scholars argue that this colonially rooted discourse and subsequent distinctions are outmoded.

The participants discussed in this article worked in African countries from the late 1950s to the early twenty-first century, through the decolonisation and independence periods.⁵² The wide social impact of decolonisation has been examined by scholars including Bailkin, who has noted how ‘decolonization … shaped daily lives and personal relationships’.⁵³ She argues that decolonisation was ‘not only a diplomatic or military process but also a social one which has contributed to the reconstruction of social relationships’.⁵⁴ Lost in the ‘cacophony about how the end of empire was understood’⁵⁵ are voices that still need to be heard. Amongst these voices are the voices of the Irish women examined in this research. While scholars have demonstrated the use of archives in interpreting the end of empire as a diplomatic and military process, there remains scope for ‘humanising the histories of decolonization’,⁵⁶ by investigating its multiple meanings for individuals. As we shall see, some of the respondents in this study struggled to articulate – and problematise – their relationship with both the coloniser and the colonised.

Viatores Christi

Viatores Christi, the first international lay volunteer organisation set up in Ireland in 1960, was established on the initiative of a group of students at University College Dublin, who were members of the Legion of Mary. Viatores Christi was founded with a Catholic ethos and recruited Catholic volunteers to travel as guests of religious orders to assist on mission projects.⁵⁷ The first volunteers participated in pastoral work with Irish emigrants in England and Scotland; from 1960 members went on assignment to Peru, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Former President of Viatores Christi, Hugh Brady, explains that the aim of the organisation was ‘to imprint a mission character on the Irish Church in all its members by making the entire community aware of its world-wide responsibility’.⁵⁸ Current CEO Shane Halpin states that through justice, compassion, integrity, commitment and respect, Viatores Christi is committed to the creation of a better world for poor and marginalised people.⁵⁹ The organisation’s understanding of ‘mission’ has moved in line with the Irish Church’s own understanding. While it once set out to win people over to Catholicism, it is now concerned with working in solidarity with the poor and marginalised.

Themes and discussion

Childhood and family life

The interview questions mainly elicited information on schooling, training and preparation, and overseas experience. Participants’ childhood and family life emerged as having a direct influence on their later decision to become a lay volunteer or a missionary nun. Almost all of the participants referred back and forth to their childhood and family life. This bore out the earlier research findings of John Wilson, who has written that benevolent parents often nurture the volunteer spirit in their children and young people are more likely to volunteer if their parents have presented volunteering in a positive and balanced way, neither too trivial nor too taxing.⁶⁰ In our research, many of the participants reported that a volunteer ‘spirit’ was fostered in their family. Often their parents were involved in the local community or in charity work. Kate, who volunteered in Tanzania for seven years, remembered the charitable spirit of her parents and the impact their actions had on the trajectory of her life She commented: ‘[My parents] set up the tearoom and everything in the prison. My father used to drive people there and he used to drive kids swimming … they moulded my life, both of my parents.’⁶¹

All of the participants were raised in Catholic households between 1930 and 1960, approximately. The oldest participant was born in 1930, at a time when over 90% of the population of Ireland was Catholic. The participants grew up in families of between two and 12 children, with the average family size being six children. They were born at a time when the Catholic Church condemned the use of contraception, and the State legislated to prevent the importation and sale of contraceptives. Growing up in large families had an impact on the participants; they were taught ‘not to be a taker’ (Emma), and – unsurprisingly – they were forced into gendered roles at home. Several had to take on family care-giving roles, and in some cases were surrogate mothers to siblings when their own mothers died. Those who grew up on farms developed practical skills that were useful in later life overseas, and some participants were strongly influenced by their own mothers. A few recalled how their mothers were what were commonly known as ‘handy women’. These were older, experienced women who nursed the sick, delivered babies or prepared bodies for burial. They had no formal training or certification but some became legendary figures within their community.⁶² Sr Kathleen and lay volunteer Kate drew parallels between their mothers’ traditional caring role in the community, and practices in the Developing World. Sr Kathleen said:

My mother was the person who was called when somebody died. And there would be a knock on the window in the middle of the night maybe and she’d be gone in the morning…. After a while you realised it was either a new baby or somebody had died. She went and she helped. See again, when I went to Africa and people talked about the traditional birth attendant, I said, ‘Sure, I mean, my mother was that’.⁶³

Kate also spoke of her mother’s role in the community:

Well, my mother was involved in everything too. When anybody died, she would be called on to go and wash the body because they were afraid of cancer in those days. Nobody would touch cancer. It was nearly like leprosy [in Africa].⁶⁴

Formal religion and personal faith

All of the participants were immersed in Catholic culture and the life of the Church as children, and 17 of them had a family member who was a member of a religious order of priests or nuns. Indeed, it emerged in conversation that three of the lay volunteers had at one point entered a congregation to become a nun, but later changed their minds. The participants all recalled the religious devotion of their parents, and four commented that their fathers had at one point wanted to enter the priesthood. Two fathers spent time in the seminary and two wanted to become priests but could not afford it or went to college instead. Kate recalled, ‘I think my father always would have liked to have been a priest but you had to have money to be a priest, quite a lot in those days’.⁶⁵ Barbara said, ‘My father was thinking of training as a priest. He didn’t go, he went to college then.’⁶⁶ Sandra explained that her father had been, ‘in the Jesuits for a year … he left or they threw him out, I don’t know which’.⁶⁷

Sr Patricia described her father’s spirituality and the impact it had on her:

My father had a very deep devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. I was 12 when he died but before that I had a sort of a sense of this and when we would walk in the evenings, we would always pay a short visit to the church. And I’m still conscious of his, what shall I say, his respect and awe. And that I think must have had a lot of influence on me.⁶⁸

The all-pervasive Catholicity of the country was summarised by Sr Suzanne, who concluded:

You didn’t know anything else. You know it was just Catholic Ireland at that time, in the ’50s and ’60s. It was just in the air. It was in the atmosphere really. It was in school. It was everywhere. And you didn’t think much about it, it was just what was. It was part of life. Part of the rhythm of life.⁶⁹

The majority of the participants went to Mass weekly; some went daily while others went twice per day. Sr Imelda’s testimony illustrates how fervent devotion could be viewed as completely normal. In her mind, attending Mass twice daily was not extraordinary or ‘overly religious’. She affirmed, ‘Life at that time was very, very ordinary. Mind you we weren’t a very overly religious family but we were brought up as good Catholics all the same. We went to Mass in the morning and after school.’⁷⁰ Sr Gabriel listed the Catholic practices that were central to her youth:

we had Mass and devotions of all kinds and we had the rosary every night which sometimes we hated. We had missions every year or two. Confessions once a month and we went to Mass and Holy Communion on Saturday as well as Sunday. You had devotions on Sunday evening and you had sodalities and God only knows what but you see there was nothing else to do. When you think about it now. And we looked forward to these things, the Benediction on a Sunday evening.⁷¹

Not all of the participants were as positive about their experiences of the institutional Church, however. For example, lay volunteer Colette said: ‘It was a tyrannical Catholic upbringing I would say. I was brought up when the priest was in charge and the priest was dogmatic. Definitely I grew up in a Church-ridden Ireland for sure.’⁷² Sr Gabriel and Sandra outlined the interplay between pastimes and religious practices and the priority devotion was given over all leisure activities. Sr Gabriel explained, ‘When we started going to the dances it was “the must” that you went to benediction before you went to the dance’. Sandra recalled:

My brother was saying the other day that my dad once gave out yards to him when he had won a relay race and Dad said to him, ‘But did you go to Mass?’ Now I never remember my father ever saying anything like that but maybe I just went [to Mass] anyway.⁷³

The influence of schooling

Exposure to the missions in school was a significant motivational force for the participants, even though the range of time in which they were at school was quite wide. The participants were in primary school from 1935 to 1982 and secondary school between 1943 and 1987. The system of education consisted of eight years of primary school followed by secondary school, which lasted five years. After three years of secondary school, students took the Group or Intermediate Certificate, a nationwide state examination. Pupils then began the two-year preparation for the final state examination, the Leaving Certificate. Entry to university was dependent on a Leaving Certificate result that met the stipulations of each course. Each participant received her primary schooling in a Catholic National school in Ireland.

There were two options for those who attended second level before fees were abolished in 1967: private fee-paying secondary schools or vocational schools. All of the participants who were in secondary school before 1967 attended private fee-paying convent schools. Convent schools maintained their popularity even after fees were abolished. In total, 17 participants attended a convent secondary school. The remaining three attended inter-denominational community schools or colleges run by the Vocational Education Committee.

Rachel was the participant who felt she benefited the most from the abolition of secondary school fees and the introduction of free school transport. The various elements of the scheme allowed her to take the state exams, which in turn enabled her to enter third-level education and subsequently secure a professional qualification. Abolishing school fees empowered Rachel to volunteer in hospitals, clinics and refugee camps overseas. She emphasised her gratitude, saying:

free education enabled me to travel to the community school for five years to do my Inter and Leaving Cert. Only for the Minister for Education, Donogh O’Malley, I might never have done the Leaving Cert … [or] spent five years in school. It was too expensive…. The free education changed my life. It did. I don’t talk about it a lot but I know in my own head it was a turning point.⁷⁴

The study of missionary life was not an official part of the school curriculum but the missions permeated school life through mission magazines, fundraising campaigns, visits from returned missionaries and mission films. The participants recalled collecting missionary magazines in school and distributing them to their neighbours. Each magazine had a children’s section and some congregations produced separate children’s publications. These children’s sections included stories, poems, competitions and fundraising campaigns. The participants spoke of the magazines with clarity.

It was also very common to have missionaries visit the schools and entertain the students with their mission stories, slides and artefacts. Sandra, a lay volunteer, recalled a visit from the Irish faith-based organisation, Viatores Christi, from whom she first learned of the concept of lay missions and realised that she did not have to become a nun to do mission work overseas. She said:

I have a fairly clear picture of them all … talking about their stories. I remember just definitely making a note that you didn’t have to be a nun in order to be a missionary and that stayed with me and along the way I decided this is what I want to do. I want to be a missionary, a lay missionary.⁷⁵

Pre-departure preparation

The nuns in this study were exposed to an intense religious formation as well as professional medical or teacher training prior to departure. A specialised training for overseas missions was not mentioned by the nun participants. They learned on the job or received counsel and advice from returned missionaries. They were at an advantage because in most cases they were to live with members of their own congregation who would give them practical advice once they arrived and support them throughout their mission tour. Sr Patricia described the support she received from fellow Sisters:

I had to teach Maths and I had to prepare everything very well because I hadn’t had any experience at all … I remember every day there was a Sister who would sit down with me and prepare everything for the next day. And like looking back that carried me and I loved the school and the work.⁷⁶

Sr Teresa spoke of a time during the Biafran War when she and a colleague cooperated to support an area which ‘had been liberated and the soldiers had moved on but the place was just heaving with refugees, orphans and displaced people. Oh that was a very happy [mission] tour. It was just myself and Sr Marian there, just the two of us.’⁷⁷

The lay volunteers on the other hand did receive formal pre-departure training, which complemented their own professional qualifications. Their pre-departure training included developing cultural awareness, team building, conflict resolution, health and safety, and development education. They generally reflected positively on their pre-departure training.

Local and transnational networking

International missionary and volunteer activity are transnational activities that are sustained across webs of connection. As Linehan has noted, ‘missionary enterprise can be regarded as a system that ranged across long distances to destinations in the Tropics, while at the same time maintaining a spiritual, pragmatic and affective relationship with individuals and communities in the locale’.⁷⁸ The types of networks that support voluntary education work include social networks, local networks and a range of internationally networked funding bodies. For nuns, there was the additional network provided through their own international congregations. Additionally, congregations had international networks of schools, and access to past pupils who were sometimes a source of fundraising and support.

However, when all of the women were ‘in the field’, it was incumbent on them to develop their own networking, and to learn how best to manage systems that were often poorly funded. The longer the women spent overseas, the better they became at developing and sustaining different networks. Sisters were particularly good at networking, perhaps because of the extended time they spent overseas. There was a camaraderie between different religious orders overseas. For example, Sr Eileen agreed to teach on a rural school project but was concerned about where she would live. She recalled:

A local priest said, ‘What about the Carmelite Sisters?’ Some of them were past pupils … So, we asked them and they said, ‘No problem. She can stay here no bother.’ And that was it. I stayed with them and we got on with it.⁷⁹

A recurring theme throughout the interviews was the support the lay volunteers received from the religious orders. This support came in the form of advice, friendship, accommodation and professional assistance. Every lay volunteer came into contact with local or international nuns or priests, many of whom were Irish. Colette relied on missionary nuns when she struggled to assimilate in a new project in South Africa. She considered terminating her placement ‘only that I was be-friended by five Loreto nuns, all retired now but living out there. They were brilliant. They are still friends of mine.’⁸⁰ Rachel spoke about the importance of building a relationship with religious missionaries:

I found the religious good because they were there much longer than us in the country especially if you got to know a few of them they were very good for giving you a good background on the situation. They would give you the benefit of their experience in many cases. I knew very little about nuns and priests until I worked overseas.⁸¹

Funding networks were another essential element of project success, particularly for the nuns who worked with reduced budgets. They utilised transnational, national, local and personal channels to secure funding. Sr Suzanne explained that she secured a grant from the Irish government to buy a generator for a rural school, which allowed the students to study in the evening. ‘The Irish government gave us a generator so they had a generator for a couple of hours of their study. That was through one of our Sisters who knew somebody’: Sr Eileen obtained a grant from the Irish charity Trócaire, which enabled two local colleagues to complete a literacy course through the University of South Africa (UNISA). Empowering the local community through education was a dominant theme in many of the narratives. Sr Eileen explained:

UNISA had put on a programme for literacy and I had these two girls, young women, and they were excellent. They were very keen. I taught them all I could teach them…. Then this programme came up and…. They wouldn’t have that kind of money. So the agreement was I would try to get half if they could pay the other half. I wrote to Trócaire and Trócaire helped and paid.⁸²

Risk and reward

The participants experienced some physical dangers, yet they tended to balance the experience of ‘risk’ with the view that the work they were doing was personally rewarding. In general, the nuns witnessed more military conflict than the lay volunteers, perhaps because the nuns spent longer periods overseas and they began their mission work earlier in the twentieth century when post-colonial conflicts were more prevalent. Working as a doctor, Sr Margaret had many experiences of armed conflict. She lived under Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda and recalled with clarity the civil and political unrest:

I was threatened many times. I had a gun at my back twice…. A jeep had overturned and their captain was unconscious and they had brought him into the hospital…. This soldier pulled out a gun and said, ‘Keep him alive’. And stuck the gun in my back. Out of my pure anger I whipped around and said, ‘Put that gun away. Guns never got life. You shoot and your friend will die’ … it’s amazing how you react on the spur of the moment. I tell you I prayed and said, ‘God will you keep this man alive’ … later when the man had improved … some of them were in visiting, well they got a bit of my hot tongue.⁸³

During a brief consultancy in South Sudan Sr Nora detailed the security measures she had to take:

That was in 1994. What we had to do was fly in a kind of a military aircraft … because the roads were not accessible … we were not allowed out from the compound once we came back from the hospital at two in the afternoon, you couldn’t go outside the gate. If you wanted to visit the other organisation, you had to go in the car because there were too many young men with rifles, you know Kalashnikovs.⁸⁴

Sr Teresa suffered a traumatic burglary during the week she was to retire from the missions. She testified to the impact the incident had on her, particularly at the culmination of her 39 years of service in Nigeria:

They came in with masks and knives and a saw and something else and they pointed it in our face…. If you ever saw a house after those armed robbers, they would tear the paint off the walls. They went into my room. I, of course didn’t go into the room because I was so frightened…. At one stage I ran out down the corridor to the two other rooms ’cos we had two other Sisters down there. And they shouted, ‘Where are you going?’. I had to go back because I thought they would shoot at me. I was positively sick that night.⁸⁵

While the participants recognised that they operated in a context where there were risks such as natural disasters and issues of personal safety, they all spoke at length about the rewards of their placements. At times rewards came in the form of experiencing autonomy in the workplace, as well as the opportunity to test one’s abilities. The participants recognised that, as women, they would not have had the same kinds of challenges and responsibilities at home in Ireland. As Emma, a principal who volunteered in retirement stated, ‘I won’t ever be bored. There is stimulation … no risk of fossilisation, challenging, and I don’t sit still.’ Emma explained that her primary role was to teach English and Art in a teacher training college but expanded into teaching computers. This was a role she would not have undertaken in Ireland, as her narrative illustrates:

Now the people in the staffroom in the school at home fell around the place in … hoots of laughter when I told them that I am going to be teaching computers. My daughter still laughs at the idea that I would be teaching computers. But needs must and so I said to my students, ‘I’ll teach you all I know. I expect you’ll learn it very quickly and then after that you teach yourselves.’⁸⁶

Sr Eileen spoke about her first mission tour at the age of 24. She commented on her apprehension and the need to be creative and resourceful:

On my arrival I was there for a while in the school being present and the next thing was, I was appointed headmistress of a little primary school! So I tell you … I nearly died. And I prayed no end about that…. I suppose I was able to improvise. When you didn’t have things, [you had] to improvise.⁸⁷

Sr Eileen explained how her task of setting up and teaching in an adult literacy centre came about. She remarked on her Superior’s faith in her ability to utilise her talents:

There was no teaching for the local people so what I was asked to do was set up a literacy centre…. I said, ‘I know nothing about it’. They said, ‘Go down, see what you see, use your skills as a teacher and get things moving’. As it happened there was this lovely big room and there were these women who wanted to learn to read and write.⁸⁸

Adventure and excitement were also significant rewards. One participant provided teacher training to a vast rural area and described the thrill in her commute to work:

about 220 schools…. It was really interesting it was a huge amount of travel though, huge…. In my last two years I was going up and down in small planes, two-seaters, four-seaters, six seaters landing in fields. That’s how remote it I was. It was incredible.⁸⁹

Conclusion

Conducting oral histories with women who have worked as volunteers and missionaries provides nuance and detail to existing histories of overseas volunteering, missionary history and the history of education. Kate Lynch, in her study of the missionary movement in the first half of the twentieth century, has argued that ‘Life in these spaces was far more complex and filled with intimate details, the majority of which cannot be ascertained from the archive’.⁹⁰ While the Irish missionary movement has been examined by historians, there remains a need to add to the literature by incorporating the voices of volunteers and missionaries into the historical narrative.

While the work of Irish-born teaching Sisters in the nineteenth century has been explored by Clear, Hoy, Peckham Magray and Raftery, there is a need for much more research on the role and experience of such women. Where scholars have commented on Christian missionaries in the Developing World, research tends to take a post-colonial perspective, adopting a broadly critical view of the involvement of Protestant and Catholic missionaries.⁹¹ Much more work has been done on British Protestant mission history than on Irish Catholic mission history.⁹²

Some insight into how Sisters experienced missionary life in the twentieth century can be gleaned from interviews and discussions that informed the work of Humphreys, McKenna and KilBride.⁹³ However, the urgency for scholars to undertake oral histories of Irish women religious in the mission field is significant, especially in light of the fact that the era of the missionary Sister has come to an end, and the remaining missionary Sisters are ageing.

Coda

When we completed the initial draft of the article in the spring of 2020, the world had witnessed the spread of COVID-19, resulting in the death of some 14,000 people.⁹⁴ As we completed the final proofs in February 2021, the death toll had reached 2.48 million million. The majority of deaths have been concentrated among seniors, in the age cohort of 65+ years. The death of our older citizens reminds us of the fragility of human life and the importance of recording lived experience. This is especially so with reference to occupations that are now obsolete. The evolving narrative of Irish lay women volunteers in education can continue to be written. But as the era of Irish missionary nuns in overseas education closes, it is important to have as complete an oral record as possible of this aspect of women’s history and the history of education.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ellen Regan

Ellen Regan is a primary school teacher, and graduate research supervisor at University College Dublin, where she completed her doctoral research in the history of education, in 2020.

Deirdre Raftery

Deirdre Raftery is Professor of the History of Education at University College Dublin. Her specialism is the education of women and girls in nineteenth century England and Ireland. She has 13 book publications, and is author of many articles and book chapters. She has held a Fulbright at Boston College, and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford.

Notes

1 Though they have different canonical meanings, it is now common in scholarship to use the terms ‘nun’ and ‘Sister’ interchangeably, and to also use the term ‘woman religious’. See Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 138.

2 In 1662, Gregory XV established the Congregation de Propaganda Fide as the central and supreme body responsible for the spread of the faith. It has gone through numerous changes and developments over the centuries, including reforms in its territories in 1908. In 1967 it was renamed the Sacred Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, or ‘de Propaganda Fide’ (CPF). For an account of CPF see N. Kowalsky OMI and J. Metzler OMI, eds., Inventory of the Historical Archives for the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, or ‘de Propaganda Fide’ (Rome: Pontifical Universitas Urbaniana, 1988).

3 Barbra Mann Wall, Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

4 Ibid., 30.

5 Edmund M. Hogan, The Irish Missionary Movement: A Historical Survey 1830–1980 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1990).

6 See Mann Wall, Into Africa, 12.

7 Daniel Murphy, A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000); McGlade, The Missions.

8 The Congrégation du Saint Esprit are known as the Spiritans in Continental Europe and in English-speaking countries. They were commonly known as the Holy Ghost Fathers. The participants in this study used the term Holy Ghost, therefore, this is the title which will be used in this article.

9 The SMA went to Ireland in 1876, founding their Irish seminary in 1909. The Holy Ghost Fathers went to Ireland in 1859 and were to become esteemed in the provision of Catholic education for boys. The White Fathers were founded in 1868 and accepted vocations in Ireland soon after. See Colm Cooke, ‘The Modern Irish Missionary Movement’, Archivium Hibernicum 35 (1980): 239. Also https://mafrome.org/home/

10 Fiona Bateman, ‘Ireland and the Nigeria–Biafra War: Local Connections to a Distant Conflict’, New Hibernia Review 16 (2012): 76.

11 Ibid., 51–2.

12 For a recent history of the foundation of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary see Catherine KilBride, The First Ten Professed: Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2019).

13 John Manton, ‘Towards the Making of a Medical Mother Superior: Marie Martin in Calabar, 1921–1924’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1999).

14 Norms for the Approbation of New Institutes (1901) was augmented in 1917 by the publication of the Code of Canon Law forbidding the practice of medicine and surgery by religious.

15 Wall, Into Africa; Manton, ‘Making of a Medical Mother Superior’; Ailish Ellen Veale, ‘“It’s all a matter of balanced tensions”: Irish Medical Missionaries in Nigeria, 1937–1967’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 2015); Mary Purcell, To Africa with Love: The Life of Mother Mary Martin Foundress of the Medical Missionaries of Mary (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1987).

16 Veale, ‘“Balanced tensions”’, 42; Hogan, Irish Missionary Movement, 195–6.

17 Wall, Into Africa, 27.

18 Ibid., 101.

19 Ailish Veale, ‘International and Modern Ideals in Irish Female Medical Missionary Activity, 1937–1962’, Women’s History Review 25 (2016): 603.

20 Mann Wall, Into Africa, 122.

21 See Richard F. Quinn, The Missionary Factor in Irish Aid Overseas (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1980), 30–4. In total 1,195,329 students were enrolled in mission-run schools.

22 Joe Humphreys, God’s Entrepreneurs: How Irish Missionaries Tried to Change the World (Dublin: New Island Books, 2010); Yvonne McKenna, Made Holy: Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006); KilBride, First Ten Professed.

23 McGlade, The Missions, 48

24 Ibid., 4.

25 Hogan, Irish Missionary Movement, 49.

26 Murphy, Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education. The untimely death of Murphy while the book was in preparation resulted in a publication that has no footnotes. It is, therefore, difficult to make sustained use of this ambitious text, or to comment conclusively on his views on the contribution of women religious to the global mission field.

27 McKenna, Made Holy.

28 Deirdre Raftery, ‘“Je suis d’aucune nation”: The Recruitment and Identity of Irish Women Religious in the International Mission Field, c.1840–1940’, Paedagogica Historica 49 (2013): 513–30; Deirdre Raftery, ‘Teaching Sisters and Transnational Networks: Recruitment and Education Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century’, History of Education 44 (2015): 717–28.

29 John Manton, ‘Administering Leprosy Control in Ogoja Province, Nigeria, 1945–67: A Case Study in Government-Mission Relations’, in Healing Bodies, Saving Souls, Medical Missions in Asia and Africa, ed. David Hardiman, (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V, 2006).

30 Wall, Into Africa.

31 McKenna, Made Holy.

32 Hogan, Irish Missionary Movement, 8.

33 Tim Pat Coogan, Wherever Green Is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora (London: Hutchinson, 2000), 512.

34 Fiona Bateman, ‘Biafra in the Irish Imagination: War and Famine in Banville’s An End to Flight and Forristal’s Black Man’s Country’, in Writing the Nigeria–Biafra War (Oxford: Boydell & Brewer, 2016); Fiona Bateman, ‘The “Battlefield of the Schoolroom”: Irish Children and Ireland’s Spiritual Empire’, in Irish Classrooms and British Empire: Imperial Contexts in the Origins of Modern Education, ed. David Dickson, Justyna Pyz and Christopher Shepard (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012); Fiona Bateman, ‘The Spiritual Empire: Irish Catholic Missionary Discourse in the Twentieth Century’ (unpublished PhD thesis, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2003).

35 Bateman, ‘“Battlefield of the Schoolroom”’.

36 See Denis Linehan, ‘Irish Empire: Assembling the Geographical Imagination of Irish Missionaries in Africa’, Cultural Geographies 21 (2014): 429–47.

37 Ibid., 444.

38 Murphy, Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education, 526.

39 Kerstin Martens, ‘Mission Impossible? Defining Non-Governmental Organizations’, Voluntas 13 (2002): 271–85; Julia Berger, ‘Religious Nongovernmental Organizations: An Exploratory Analysis’, Voluntas 14 (2003): 15–39; Jennifer N. Brass, Wesley Longhofer, Rachel S. Robinson and Allision Schnable, ‘NGOs and International Development: A Review of Thirty-Five years of Scholarship’, World Development 112 (2018): 136–49.

40 Kevin O’Sullivan, Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire: Small State Identity in the Cold War, 1955–75 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).

41 Tony Farmar, Believing in Action: The First Thirty Years of Concern 1968–2000 (Dublin: A. & A. Farmar, 2002).

42 Enda Staunton, ‘The Case of Biafra: Ireland and the Nigerian Civil War’, Irish Historical Studies 31 (1999): 513–34; Bateman, ‘Ireland and the Nigeria–Biafra War’.

43 Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Humanitarian Encounters: Biafra, NGOs and Imaginings of the Third World in Britain and Ireland, 1967–70’, Journal of Genocide Research 16 (2014): 302.

44 Ivor Goodson and Pat Sikes, Life History Research in Educational Settings: Learning from Lives (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001), 17.

45 Ibid., 2.

46 See Kristina R. Llewellyn and Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, eds., Oral History and Education: Themes, Dilemmas and Practices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 337–60.

47 See Julie Perone, ‘Inspiring Pedagogy: Talking to Educators About Oral History in the Classroom’, in Oral History and Education, ed. Llewellyn and Ng-A-Fook, 253–72.

48 Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner, Becoming Teachers: Texts and Testimonies, 1907–1950 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2007).

49 The priority states were Lesotho, Zambia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda and Mozambique. Countries added later were Albania, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Eritrea, Ghana, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

50 O’Sullivan, Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire; Declan O’Brien, Ireland and the Third World: A Study of Government Aid (Dublin: Development Research Unit of the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, 1980); Mary Sutton, Irish Government Aid to the Third World: Review and Assessment (Dublin: Trocaire, 1977).

51 David Lewis, ‘Heading South: Time to Abandon the “Parallel Worlds” of International Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) and Domestic Third Sector Scholarship?’, Voluntas 25 (2014): 1141. The distinctions were: First/Third World; Developed/Undeveloped; Developing/Underdeveloped; and North/South. The ‘First World’ included Western Europe, America, Canada and Australia. The ‘Second World’ referred to the Communist bloc and the ‘Third World’ encompassed Africa, Asia and South America.

52 There are different perspectives offered in study of ‘decolonization’: while political historians tend to focus on ‘the Cabinet, the Colonial Office … [and] the Foreign Office’, seeing decolonisation as a diplomatic and military process, cultural historians have explored how decolonisation has infused literature and film. See Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 11–12.

53 Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire, 5.

54 Ibid., 12.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 14.

57 http://vcvolunteers.ie/about-us

58 Louis Dineen, ‘Lay Missionaries: A Symposium’, The Furrow 21, no. 3 (1970): 160.

59 http://vcvolunteers.ie/faith-based-development/

60 John Wilson, ‘Volunteering’, Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 215–40.

61 Interview with Kate (January 27, 2018).

62 Kevin C. Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1994), 48.

63 Interview with Sr Kathleen (August 17, 2016).

64 Interview with Kate (January 27, 2018).

65 Ibid.

66 Interview with Barbara (February 11, 2018).

67 Interview with Sandra (February 9, 2017).

68 Interview with Sr Patricia (February 9, 2017).

69 Interview with Sr Suzanne (February 12, 2017).

70 Interview with Sr Imelda (October 6, 2017).

71 Interview with Sr Gabriel (November 8, 2016).

72 Interview with Colette (November 8, 2017).

73 Interview with Sandra (February 9, 2017).

74 Interview with Rachel (November 3, 2017).

75 Interview with Sandra (February 9, 2017).

76 Interview with Sr Patricia (February 9, 2017).

77 Interview with Sr Teresa (September 2, 2016).

78 Linehan, ‘Irish Empire’, 430.

79 Interview with Sr Eileen (November 3, 2017).

80 Interview with Colette (November 8, 2017).

81 Interview with Rachel (November 3, 2017).

82 Interview with Sr Eileen (November 3, 2017).

83 Interview with Sr Margaret (November 7, 2017).

84 Interview with Sr Nora (September 28, 2016).

85 Interview with Sr Teresa (September 2, 2016).

86 Interview with Emma (October 30, 2017).

87 Interview with Sr Eileen (November 3, 2017).

88 Ibid.

89 Interview with Colette (November 8, 2017).

90 Kate Lynch, ‘“For a Splendid Cause”: Irish Missionary Nuns at Home and on the Mission Field, 1921–1962’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012).

91 Deirdre Raftery, ‘Religions and the History of Education: A Historiography’, History of Education 41 (2012): 41–56.

92 Ibid., passim. See also Deirdre Raftery, ‘Themes and Approaches in Research on Religions and the History of Education: Missionaries, Monasteries, Methodologies’, Religion and Education 1, no. 1 (2019): 19.

93 See Humphreys, God’s Entrepreneurs; McKenna, Made Holy; KilBride, The First Ten Professed.

94 Downloaded from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/on March 26, 2020, and re-checked on February 23, 2021.