Once boasting a peak number of 13,400 members — in the 1960s — Irish female religious orders today count fewer than 4,000 women, with an average age exceeding 80.
Documenting their history and cultural impact is both a matter of dwindling opportunity and still-raw sensitivities, as Ireland grapples with the spiritual damage from decades of abuse scandals. They include the hideous tragedies of the sister-run Magdalene Laundries and mother and baby homes, now the subject of confidential negotiations between the government and religious orders brokering an $875 million survivor compensation package.
It was in this charged communal context that award-winning Irish author, journalist and broadcaster Dearbhail McDonald — who honed her craft reporting on seemingly scandal after scandal in the church — undertook the television project that became The Last Nuns in Ireland.
The documentary — and a companion piece, The Last Priests in Ireland — aired on Irish state broadcaster RTÉ in January.
Trained as both a lawyer (Trinity College Dublin) and journalist (Dublin City University), McDonald — still a self-described St. Clare’s girl, referencing her convent school education — admits she struggled to reconcile the undoubted achievements of our women in religious orders with the undeniable legacy of abuse.
The Last Nuns in Ireland is, then, both a personal and public attempt to make some kind of peace with a complicated spiritual and cultural legacy.
Global Sisters Report: Could you tell us about the inspiration for this project? As Ireland rapidly secularizes and religious orders dwindle in numbers, did you feel an urgency to document the lives of these women now?
McDonald: The starting point of this project was a pitch by Scratch Films to RTÉ to undertake an archiving project to record elderly priests’ and nuns’ life stories before they are lost.
