Nano Nagle (1718-1784) :
Educator

Caitriona Clear

Issue 390, vol.98, Summer 2009

The Nagles – with a family estate near Mallow – were connected by blood or marriage with most of the Catholic gentry, and with many Protestants. Nano (properly, Honoria) is thought to have been born in 1718. After school on the continent and a sojourn of some years in Paris, she returned to Ireland. Then – the members of her family that she had been closest to, having all died – she again went to France, and entered a convent : only to be told by a confessor that it was her duty to go back home and do something for the poor of her own country.

Living in Cork city with her brother Joseph and his wife, around 1754 she opened a school for thirty girls in a mud cabin she had rented. By 1769 she was running seven schools (and now living on her own). She used pay monitresses, but gave the religious instruction herself. Then, with the help of a family legacy, she was finally ready to put the schools on a more permanent footing – by founding a convent.

She managed to get three young Irish women accepted as novices for her Irish mission by the Ursulines in Paris. But at the end of 1775, with three new companions, she instituted her own sisterhood. The aim of the congregation was to exclude every act of charity that was not in favour of the poor. By the time she died in 1784 she had established links with the Dublin sisterhood of Teresa Mulally – which in 1794 amalgamated with Nano’s sisterhood under the common title of Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. By 1850 there were forty Presentation convents in Ireland and three abroad.

Each of these came (until 1976) under the jurisdiction of the local bishop; but an eventual world-wide Presentation web was ‘kept together and in touch by the name and memory of Nano Nagle’. A Sister who knew the older Nano recalls her confiding that her return to Ireland in 1746 had made her feel ‘as if deprived of everything that was pleasant and desirable’. However, she was single-minded ever after in the pursuit of her dream. The contemporary practice of nuns being confined to their convent and grounds, in fact in the end worked in her favour : the Sisters could school the poor without distraction. She succeeded, too, in fending off Protestant proselytising – and she stood up to the local bishop when he expressed fears that the establishment of the convent might provoke a Protestant backlash.

Caitriona Clear lectures in the Department of History, National University of Ireland, Galway.