RELIGIOUS orders are not the flavour of the month any more. From once being the wielders of power and the authors of law and letters, they have become apologetic, almost furtive. We forget the good they did many of the great institutions in Irish life were founded by religious who had to challenge existing institutions and existing torpor to survive. And as is clear from a quite marvellous publication from Gill and Macmillan, Women of Ireland, vast numbers of the unsung giants of `Irish' history were women. Nuns especially.
Ii is no longer good enough to complain about childhood memories of abuse, as if that were the primary contribution of the religious orders of Ireland to the people of Ireland. Most nuns abused nobody.
They gave themselves to the task of educating, of nursing of caring for the old, the mad, the poor. That their values might not be our values today is irrelevant. We cannot judge them by the standards of 1996, which will not be the standards of 2006 or 2016. We can only judge by the standards they set themselves.
Women of Ireland
What are we to make of Mother Mary Martin, founder of the Medical Missionaries of Mary? She manages to be neglected in all sorts of ways, for she was one of the hundreds of Irishwomen who volunteered as nurses in the first World War, and of course such women have vanished completely from a history which has been driven by the twin imperatives of masculinity and nationalism. She was in her 40s and suffering from both a bad heart and malana when she founded the Medical Missionaries of Mary in Nigeria.
She went on to found the centre of tropical medicine in Ireland in Drogheda in 1957 when she was in her 60s. That hospital was to give her last bed when her weak heart finally proved unequal to the struggle in 1975. Of course, her name is known to those intimately associated with missionary work and medicine but it is not generally known.
And of course, no statue commemorates her work any more than statues have been raised to any woman apart from the essentially masculine and to my mind, detestable figure of Countess Markievicz, murderer of an unarmed policeman in St Stephen's Green.
No memorial effigies
So no memorial effigies to those great women such as Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy, who have educated millions of girls throughout the world or Mary Aikenhead, founder of the Sisters of Charity, with a similar contribution to the world at large and both, interestingly enough, encouraged by coadjutor Bishop of Dublin, Dr Murray does he, too, not deserve to be remembered for his contribution to the education of women?
Let me not mislead you Women of The Land is not about heroic old nuns fighting bad hearts and curving spines upon their gallant deathbeds. It is a catalogue of women who have made their mark in Irish life. It is a little uncritical my friends Constance and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington were moved as much by hate of their enemies as by love of the oppressed, and no mention is made of the deplorable part the latter played in the absurd controversy over The Plough and The Stars.
And it is also a tiny bit anachronistic Thekla Beere is called "chairperson" of the Irish National Commission on the Status of Women in 1971, when that vile neologism had not yet made its politically correct appearance.
And I dislike the style which refers throughout to women by their first names, even cop killing Connie, and the men by their second.
That aside, the authors, Kit and Cyril O Ceirin, as well as repairing our shameful ignorance of the contributions of Irishwomen to this country, may also have helped revive the fortunes and the reputation of Emily Lawless, who though very much a woman of her time, and speaking in the voice of a sorrowful and thwarted nationalism, remains a very fine writer indeed.
Critical eclipse
What perversity of memory causes such a woman to be neglected? The authors think that it was her unionism (nationalist tinged) which caused her critical eclipse. Perhaps it was but could that be grounds for neglecting her elegant and moving poems which ring with love for Ireland and the Irish? Yes, these poems speak with a romantic nationalism and with notions of gallantry which are no longer fashionable but they are fine works, with elegant metres and haunting, simple emotions, such as Fontenoy, in which the Irish dead are seen returning to their beloved Clare "Mary Mother, shield us! Say, what men are ye, Sweeping past so swiftly on this morning sea? "Without sails or rowlocks merrily we glide Home to Corca Bascinn on the brimming tide."
"Jesus save you gentry! Why are ye so white, Sitting all so straight and still in this misty night?" "Nothing ails us brother; joyous souls are we, Sailing home together, on the morning sea.
Is that not the kind of poetry which would thrill a child, as even now it thrills me? I will return to the scandalous neglect of this lovely poet soon. In the meantime, let me urge you to learn a little bit more about those in part who made us Women of Ireland, a biographical dictionary, and an essential textbook for us all.