Sr Bosco Murray, provincial of the Bon Secours Order (1992-2000), died on August 2nd in Cork following a remarkably diverse and colourful life. Armed with compelling vision, she was a vigorous proponent of the maxim that “standing still is not an option”.
Born Esther Bridget Murray in 1936 in Mitchelstown, Co Cork, where her garda father was stationed, she was raised in Ballyragget, Co Kilkenny, with four siblings, two of whom also joined religious life. Her happiest childhood memories were of long summers in Glenbeigh with her maternal O’Connor family.
Esther entered the Bon Secours Order in 1954, trained as a nurse, and for seven years served in the order’s hospitals throughout Ireland before being selected to serve in the generalate in Rome. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, traversing the streets on her bicycle and speaking fluent Italian, she became a well-known and loved personality in the Monte Santo neighbourhood, bringing care to the sick and poor in their homes. Her love of the local trattoria became legendary.
Showing early leadership attributes, in 1977 she was promoted to the Bon Secours global leadership team as congregation general councillor and assistant superior general. She took a particular interest in the hospital governance and management practices that had evolved in the order’s American province and, when elected provincial in Ireland in 1992, set about implementing radical reforms. She recognised that declining vocations threatened the sustainability of religious hospitals and she saw the need to professionalise leadership, to modernise management and to harness the power of consolidation and scale.
With some resistance from traditionalists, Sr Bosco spearheaded the creation of a not-for-profit company into which all the hospitals were grouped, recruiting some of Ireland’s leading business figures as directors, alongside colleague sisters, creating a model subsequently replicated by other Irish congregations. As board chair and representing the sole shareholder, the sisters, she promoted major investment and modernisation in the hospitals in Cork, Dublin and Tralee, the acquisition of Galvia Hospital in Galway, the La Retraite complex in Cork and the construction of a US model inspired care village for the elderly in Mount Desert, Cork. Bon Secours became Ireland’s largest private care provider.
Late in her term, invited by the Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood to visit Zimbabwe, she was struck by the needs of St Luke’s, a small bush hospital run by an elderly German doctor near the Bulawayo-Victoria Falls Road. She raised funds in Ireland and recruited young doctors from Europe to sustain it. She was particularly struck by the lack of local radio in rural communities and another career germinated. When most succumb to the attractions of retirement, Sr Bosco returned to her beloved Rome to undertake degrees in communications at the Salesian Pontifical University. She joined Vatican Radio, broadcasting for several years alongside Sean Lovett in the English programmes department.
In 2006, aged 70, she joined St Augustine’s University in Mwanza, Tanzania where, over 10 years she developed a faculty of communication and journalism, teaching classes of over 400 students while also becoming vice-president for development. In her small campus bungalow, she was agony aunt to many of her students and became acutely aware of the safety needs of the university’s female students lacking secure accommodation. Always the problem-solver, she established the St Augustine’s Foundation in Ireland to raise funds and with support from her Bon Secours Sisters a hostel accommodating 400 women was completed in 2022.
In 2016, Sr Bosco retired to Ireland but continued to work for the poor in Northern Tanzania, supporting small projects in education and farming. Shortly before she died, she was invited back to Mwanza to dedicate the student hostel named after her but sadly was unfit to travel.
Ever a mould-breaker, Sr Bosco chose her own resting place, nestled in the hills overlooking Glenbeigh. She is finally standing still.