Social innovator and political activist Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, or Sister Stan as she is affectionately known, has dedicated her life to the service of the poor and to fighting for a fairer, more equal society. Now, in The Road Home, Stan looks back on her early life in rural Ireland, and to the life-changing decision she made at the age of eighteen to become a nun.
Inspired by the work of Mary Aikenhead, who founded the Congregation of the Religious Sisters of Charity in 1815, and her mentor, Bishop Peter Birch, she helped to set up a comprehensive model of community care in Kilkenny that was to become a blueprint for the rest of Ireland.
Reflecting on the many challenges she has met, we see how Stan has worked tirelessly – sometimes against strong opposition – to help establish vital voluntary groups, such as Focus Ireland, now the biggest national organization for the homeless; Young Social Innovators, which provides social awareness education for 15–18 year-olds; and the Immigrant Council of Ireland, a human rights organization which promotes and supports the rights of immigrants. She has also created The Sanctuary Meditation Centre, a place of peace and healing which is located in the heart of Dublin’s bustling city centre.
Inspiring and thought-provoking, this fascinating memoir provides a unique insight into the life and work of one of the most influential social activists of our day. It is, quite simply, the remarkable story of a remarkable woman.
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Epigraph
Foreword by Mary McAleese
1. Deora Dé
2. A Different Path
3. A Turn in the Road
4. Combating Poverty
5. Focus on Homelessness
6. Leading Change
7. Home from Home
8. Welcoming Change
9. Education for Active Citizenship
10. The Marginalization of Dissent
11. A Vision of Social Justice for the Ireland of the Future
12. Building Sanctuary
13. Gratitude
14. Home to God
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Also by Sister Stan
Copyright
To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
David Whyte (from the poem What to Remember When Waking)
by Mary McAleese, President of Ireland
The words of T.S. Eliot, ‘Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail,’ beautifully sum up the life journey of Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, whose wonderful work I have been privileged to witness on many occasions during my years as President of Ireland and indeed to share in long before I became President.
Sr Stanislaus – or Sr Stan as she has become affectionately known – is one of those rare people who knows that, in order to make life better for others, it is often necessary to choose the paths in life that are unfamiliar, difficult to navigate, and strewn with obstacles. Sr Stanislaus has never been afraid to set out down those demanding paths, to break new ground and to bring others with her. It is humbling to realize how, on many occasions, the only signposts she had to guide her came from her faith and from her heart and they told her to follow the voice of ‘compassion’, ‘care’, ‘concern’, ‘empathy’, ‘kindness’ and, of course, ‘courage’. No matter where they led, she followed.
Sr Stan’s determination to give her life to help the poor and the marginalized was awoken in a bleak, post-World-War, impoverished Ireland still coming to grips with a hard-fought-for independence. It was an Ireland navigating in uncharted waters as it moved from being a small, inward-looking country to a key player on the European stage, from being a land torn apart by conflict and violence to an island at peace, from being a mono-cultural country to one that people of all nationalities have chosen to call home. With each transformative phase the quality of life for many improved, but there has always been work to do for the poor and marginalized.
As the landscape changed, so too did the needs of our most vulnerable people and Sr Stanislaus kept pace with changing needs, outreaching to the homeless and to Ireland’s new citizens from other parts of the world and encouraging the early development of a sense of social responsibility in our young people through her very successful Young Social Innovators initiative.
It would be impossible to measure fully the good that Sr Stan has done, the lives she has touched so graciously and caringly, the light of hope she has switched on for men, women and children who lived in the darkness of exclusion. ‘Two shortens the road,’ says the old Irish proverb, and that is what Sr Stan has done for a lot of people. She has walked with them, talked with them, listened to them and brought them to a better and a safer destination than might have seemed possible at the start.
It is hard to imagine Ireland without Sr Stanislaus’s special charisma of care and her utter fidelity to the great commandment to love one another, which infuses all she does. I am proud to know her, proud to have worked with her and grateful to have such an inspirational champion of charity helping our country to fulfil its destiny as a republic that ‘cherishes all the children of the nation equally’.
I wish her continued success as she navigates us closer to that destiny.
Mary McAleese
President of Ireland
I WAS BORN Treasa Kennedy near Lispole on the Dingle peninsula in County Kerry in the south-west of Ireland, between Conor Hill and the Atlantic Ocean, during World War II – 1939 to be exact. That part of Kerry was partly Irish-speaking at the time. People are very proud to speak good Irish today, but in those days it was considered the language of poverty, and people tended to favour English. But I grew up in a household where Irish was spoken alongside English.
My family, like many local families, had its roots in Kerry for many generations. The Kennedys came to the Dingle peninsula from Tipperary in the middle of the eighteenth century. My father was Tadgh Mhuillean (Tadgh of the Mill), and was called that because his family owned a mill on the river in the nineteenth century. To this day where we live is called Mhuillean, even though its correct title is Rinn Bhui, the Yellow Hill, because of the abundance of montbretia that grows there. I was known as Treasa, one of Tadgh A. Mhuillean’s daughters. Being able to identify a place as somewhere you belong is something I took for granted as a child, but now it is very important to me, and the area I grew up in has left an indelible mark on my life. I love everything about the area: the community spirit, the football, the storytelling, the mountains and rivers and seas, the lakes and the valleys. It has an energy – a physical energy – which is the source of its language and its stories, its plays and poetry; it has a special accent and a certain toughness. Much of it is shaped by the landscape, and the landscape has a profound effect on its people.
I have a crystal-clear memory of how both the rising and the setting sun cast dancing lights on the hills; even after a shower of rain, everything seemed clearer – cleansed, in a way. Going back home now, and as I walk on Inch or Ventry Strand, I feel my childhood being reawakened through the sand, the sound of the waves, the smell of the sea and the wind and rain on my face; the beautiful shades of blues and greens, greys, yellows, purples. Now I can walk these strands with ease, and in all seasons, for every day different hues of nature appear to me.
I was one of six children (though my youngest brother died at birth) and I grew up among fishermen and farmers, the caretakers of a peasant tradition. I was very aware of the emigration and unemployment which did not allow many young people to live and work in the country, and I knew that most young people who didn’t get into secondary school left Ireland in search of a better future.
My mother had emigrated to America as a young woman, but unusually she returned home. She enjoyed her time in America, but she knew that the immigrant life there was not what she wanted for her children, and she was absolutely determined that we would all be educated so that we could find work at home in Ireland.
In my early childhood, most of my entertainment came from simple games played in fields and roads; we would go to swim or paddle in the ‘short strand’ or climb the side of Conor Hill or the strickeen, which was at the back of our house, and though it was only a thousand feet, it felt as if it was several thousands. At night people gathered in the kitchen and the children of the house, who were supposed to be in bed, would sit on the stairs listening to the conversations going on below. At that time no one travelled too far out of the locality, unless it was to attend a hospital appointment or go to work in Dublin – or, of course, to emigrate.
And so the conversations tended to focus on local people and local events.
There was also storytelling and card-playing to be enjoyed in place of cinema, television or radio. It was a life of mystery, beauty and simplicity. The pattern of day and night, the rhythm of the seasons, of life and death – all this was lived unselfconsciously in the presence of God. The life of the people was deeply incarnational, as they saved the hay, cut and footed the turf (peat), brought tea to the fields or the bog, caught trout and salmon, told the time from the sun and the tide.
My first school was Lispole National School, which was a two-mile walk away, and when I left this school it was a very lonely time for me. I had made many, many friends and there was nobody from my class going to secondary school with me. At the same time, my three older sisters had left home and were training to be teachers or nurses. I was on my own at home, with my brother, who was two years younger than me. To me, he was just a very young child and I didn’t want much to do with him. In fact, we seemed to spend most of our time squabbling! It was only when my sisters came home on holidays that things changed. They obviously regarded themselves as a bit more sophisticated than us because they were out in the world and we were still at school, so my brother and I became closer, and that was how it remained.
Me as a child, aged around eight or nine.
Going to secondary school meant riding three miles into town, in Dingle. And this I had to do on my own, without family or friends to accompany me. It was certainly a challenge to develop new relationships and find my feet in what was, essentially, foreign territory. But somehow I managed.
Life at home had a gentleness to it. I remember my mother bringing the eggs from the henhouse in her turned up, crossover apron, and how she would mindfully, gently, place them in a bowl in the kitchen. I remember, too, watching her kneading bread or carefully rolling out the pastry for the delicious apple tarts she baked. Nothing was rushed, or forced, just mindful, focused work that she seemed happy to do.
I can see now my father coming down the road, walking meditatively behind the cows as they came home to be milked. The cows walking so, so slowly. I see him leaning over the pillar of the gate as he watched and listened to the cows chewing the hay or chewing the cud; I can feel the stillness as we sat on our three-legged stools milking the cows. There was a calmness, a rhythm and a beauty to these simple tasks.
As a young child growing up on a farm, I watched my father work the land and spent a lot of time out of doors. This closeness to the land came from walking it and working it and, in a sense, I recognized early that satisfaction is easily achieved in farm life. There was satisfaction when the hay is saved, the corn is reaped and thrashed, the turf is cut, when the potatoes are set and picked, when the cow calves and the milk tanks are full. All of this comes, of course, from hard work, but it was a rich life, simplicity at its best, surrounded by nature and animals. One of the best aspects of my childhood was that we always had animals around us – calves, horses, ponies, donkeys, sheep, goats – and all so much a part of our daily, hectic life. It was fun, and there was never a dull moment, but we knew too that living on a farm entailed certain responsibilities.
My parents on the farm, taken around 1946.
As children, we had to help with duties around the farm: saving the hay and the corn, footing the turf (a way of drying out the turf after it was cut), setting, weeding and picking the potatoes and other vegetables we grew. It was hard, tiring work, but we were shown how to do things properly and never deviated from that. For example, when we were setting the potatoes, after the sod was turned over we all had our own place beside the ridge and were taught how to place the seed potatoes in a certain way, with the eye facing up and at a certain distance from each other along the ridge. Saving the hay was a great event we all helped with. But the weather had to be fine. I remember when the weather was bad, the priest gave permission from the altar allowing farmers to work on Sunday.
There was much excitement about the place when the neighbours gathered to help each other bring home the turf or stack the hay. The hay was brought in from the fields at the end of the summer on carts drawn by horses, and stacked in one big stack in the yard. We had so much fun going back and forth on the cart!
Another enjoyable occasion was the American Wakes. The American Wake was a carry over from a long tradition of emigration in the area. It dates back to the earlier part of the twentieth century, a time of high emigration to America. At that time, few emigrants to America were expected to return, so a big party was held in the area before they left, to Wake them, as it were, and send them on their journey. This was a big occasion for food, drink and music, singing and dancing. There was also lovely food and drinks for the children. During my childhood the American Wakes were generally held when Americans were returning to the States after their holiday in Ireland.
Like all youngsters I lived for the moment, the fun, the games, the visiting of neighbours and cousins, and other family members. Indeed, family was, and still is, very important to me.
My parents led by example more than words. They never sought material gain, yet their lives were full. This is part of the legacy they passed on to their children: live life simply, but live it well. Growing up, I learned that we were not just individuals, but part of a family and a community – and as part of a community we have a responsibility to make the world we have inherited a better place for those who live beside us in the present, and for those who will come after us in the future.
My parents were quietly spoken and mild in manner. They were humble but proud people. My mother was a small woman, a great cook, and managed the house and the children. She was very handy with a needle and made a lot of our clothes. She was also quite a strong personality, with a great trust and faith in education. She wanted us girls to have proper professions because she believed that women should have the means to be independent in case they were left alone in later life. There was quite a bit of pressure put on us to succeed, for my mother wanted the best for her children and would leave no stone unturned to achieve it. She did this to a fault and if we didn’t do well in an exam or get a scholarship that was up for grabs, she certainly wasn’t pleased!
It was with some nervousness that I approached my mother to tell her about my decision to enter the convent. I think she was taken aback at first – but she neither encouraged, nor discouraged me; she merely warned me how strict convent life would be. Perhaps, because I was enjoying spending time with other young people – and going to parties and dances was very much a part of my life – she thought I wouldn’t stick at it, and that I would soon be looking for another job. When she told my father, he was totally shocked and said nothing about it for a long time. Eventually, he simply said to my mother, ‘Isn’t that a damn quare thing that Treasa is doing?’
My father was tall and slim and was very much the bread-winner because he worked the farm and that was our only source of income. I never heard my parents raise their voices to each other in the house, although my mother did raise her voice to us children to sort us out when need be. And if we were fighting, we did it outside. We were never allowed to shout and scream in the house, so we took our troubles out into the garden, the yard or the shed! There was rough and tumble, and a lot of suspense in the air when there was a football match on the radio. The men would gather around and once the ball was thrown in, the next two hours were full of excitement – although no child dared speak a word until after the game had finished.
My fondest memories of home during my childhood are of Christmas time. Christmas began early in our house. It began really with baking the Christmas cake. My mother would get in a store of currants, raisins, candied peel, nutmeg and other spices, and the day of baking the cake was a big day. We gathered round the table as she mixed the ingredients, and there was a lovely aroma. When the cake went into the oven we all had to be really quiet, because we understood that if we made any noise, the cake would fall. It was very exciting, seeing the cake come out of the oven – and there was that gorgeous smell.
The other exciting Christmas preparation was the collecting of holly and ivy. We had plenty of ivy around the house and fields, but we had to go what I thought was a long distance to collect the holly. In fact it was only about half a mile away. But we had to go through the fields, because the field where the holly was was land-locked so we had to travel by foot and cross the river to get there. It was winter and the river was, I thought, very high. The smaller ones of us would have to be lifted on to somebody’s back to get across it. The holly tree was not on our land. It was over in Flemmingstown. It was a beautiful tree with red berries. My father made a pile of the holly, which he bound together with a rope and brought home on his back. We carried little branches. The house was then decorated with the holly and ivy, and I thought it was lovely. And in between the holly and the ivy we would place the Christmas cards and other decorations.
Shopping was another important part of the early preparation for Christmas. Our parents went to town and brought home lots of goodies, including sweet cakes, currant cake, biscuits and sweets, and whiskey, porter and port wine. It was a tradition that the shopkeepers gave Christmas presents to their customers, and these included port wine and sherry, and different kinds of sweet cake and loaves. We shopped at Muiris Dans, Foxy Johns and Jack Connors in Dingle, and in Hicksons and Caseys in Lispole. They all gave us Christmas presents, and it wasn’t about the amount they gave as much as the fact that they gave presents. We normally never had alcohol in the house, except for Christmas and for the Stations.
On Christmas Eve my parents went to town and bought whatever else was needed for Christmas. It was a day of fasting and abstinence. A tradition in the area was that on Christmas Eve we would have a fish dinner and the particular type of fish was ling. My mother would cook it when she came home from town and make white sauce with onions. We all hated fish but once that meal was over, Christmas was beginning. Another local tradition was that the whole house was lit up to welcome the child Jesus. All the windows would have a candle lit in them: even after we got electricity we still lit candles in the windows and the whole afternoon we as children spent time getting the candles ready, cutting out turnips and filling jars with sand to hold the candles. We had to wait until my father gave us the OK to light up. We couldn’t wait for darkness to come! It was so exciting. The other households did the same so when we looked out towards the hillside and towards the valley, all we could see were all these little lights like lanterns hanging from the sky. That to me was magical.
On Christmas Eve night we were allowed to go to our next door neighbours, the Rourkes, to visit. Mrs Rourke was an old lady and she lived with her sons, Tom and Jack. Later on Jack married and Tom went to England. Mrs Rourke gave us lemonade, biscuits and cake and that was great, because it was a big treat at a time of rationing. We returned to our own house to get the same. My father visited the Rourkes too and he got porter and whiskey, then the neighbours Jack and Tom came to our house for the same. That would be the only visiting that would be done before Christmas. The women stayed at home on Christmas Eve. They visited on 6 January which was small Christmas, or Nollaig na mBan (Women’s Christmas), when port and Christmas cake was the usual fare.
After that visit to the neighbours was over we started to get ready for the next day. The usual washing, and getting our best clothes out. We went to bed early because we had to get up at about six in the morning to get to mass. As we went to mass in a hired car, we waited for the car to come early in the morning with great excitement. My father in the front with my brother while we all sat in the back of the car with my mother. As a child, for me one of the most thrilling things was going out in the morning, when it was still dark and the sky was full of stars, and being driven in a big fancy car.
On Christmas Day my mother put a lot of work into the dinner. Christmas Day was always a day to be at home. We never visited anyone, and were never visited by anyone that day.
The next day, St Stephen’s Day, was also a great day for us as children. On St Stephen’s Day, crowds of people took to the roads and streets in fancy dress, wearing masks or straw suits and accompanied by musicians, singers and dancers – remembering a festival with antecedents that long predate Christmas. It was called the Day of the Wren. They formed groups in different streets and villages, and called to each house to play and sing and dance. They were always welcomed and rewarded with donations.
The Day of the Wren, pronounced and written wran, was once common all over Ireland, but like many customs in rural areas it came close to extinction. From the twenties and thirties onward, emigration took a great toll on those who would have taken part, but since the fifties there has been a revival, especially in Dingle. We loved to see the Wran, and as children we even took part in small wrans. The money raised in the collections by the big Wran went towards holding a ball in the local hotel or public house. This was a great occasion, with food and drink and craic and ceol. The party/ball was for adults only and was frowned upon by the nuns in the convent. When you returned to school after Christmas, if they heard you had been involved in the wran, you were in big trouble.
The family home in Lispole, built by my father and grandfather in 1916.
Some of the money raised was given to charity. I didn’t realize as a child that I and Focus Ireland would be a beneficiary of the Wran later in life.
Our house was a two-storey farmhouse, built by my father and his father in 1916. When I was about eight years old, we got running water in the house – a little earlier than most in the area because my father was very able and, with the help of a neighbour, managed to pipe water from one of our high fields, which had a well. A few years later electricity came to the area as part of the Rural Electrification Scheme. Watching the electrician wire up the house, being able to plug a kettle into the wall socket to heat the water, or turning on the wireless by flicking a switch – this was all amazing! Yet I don’t recall ever feeling deprived when we lived without these luxuries because, I suppose, everyone in the area was in the same situation.
We had a lovely garden in the front and a farmyard at the back. We had apple and other fruit trees, a small vegetable patch and lots of roses and other flowers. My mother loved her garden.
The house was situated beside a river and this river separated the parish of Lispole from Dingle. We all loved the river, and would sit on the bank and watch it flow or on the little bridge, where we spent time fishing. We’d paddle about in the shallow parts of the river, picking blackberries as we splashed about. Picking these blackberries was very important because we could sell them at the local shop and get what we thought was a substantial amount of money for them – perhaps half a crown for a bucket of blackberries.
Sometimes we fell in the river – or threw each other in – and today I am reminded of this special time when I read John O’Donohue’s lines:
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
When we were small, we had three bedrooms: one for my parents, one for my brother and one for the four of us girls. During my childhood, an extension was built on to the house which gave us a large kitchen and another bedroom. The kitchen was also a utility room and the hub of the house, as was the custom in those days. It was where we cooked our meals, ate and more or less lived our lives. We also had a parlour, but that was used only on special occasions and for special visits.
I date my first awareness of the spiritual from my childhood in Kerry. On summer nights, a group of us children would gather together in a field of new-mown hay. Lying on our backs, we would wait for the sky to darken and the stars to come twinkling out. We lay there enraptured by the fragrance of the hay, listening to the singing of the birds, the strange rasping cry of the corncrake from the bog, the voices of the frogs from the bog and river and the flow of the river itself. I treasure the memory of those bright summer evenings of my childhood, and I now realize – though of course I did not think of it in this way at the time – that experiences like this laid down a deep spiritual foundation.
The first time I heard the dawn chorus I was about twelve years old, and I stood at the back of the house, beside the river, where the montbretia and the fuchsia were in full bloom against mountain ash and oak trees. The glorious song of a multitude of birds broke over me, and in a moment that is still alive for me today, it was as if I had never heard birds singing before. I began to wonder if they always sang like that and I just hadn’t noticed. As I stood and listened to the birds pouring out their song above me, and gazed at the beauty around me, it felt as if the day grew brighter and brighter and everything around me grew still. In fact, in those few moments, time did seem to stand still and feelings of awe and wonder took me over. I was standing in the presence of something very special, something beyond sacred.
It is very difficult to express what this experience meant to me, but when I look back at it I know it was one of the most significant moments of my life – a very special moment of awareness and mystery, for, quite suddenly, this very normal day had become extraordinary to me. And although I forgot about it for many years, I know now it was a spiritual moment too, one which drew me into a stillness that has remained with me. Right through my life, wherever I have lived, in the country or in the middle of the city, and no matter what the demands and the pressures of life, I have always sought out opportunities to experience moments of stillness, to access that special peace.
For me, nature provided the opportunity to connect with stillness, but the world of art, music or poetry can also have this effect. Even a sudden loss or an illness can bring new meaning to our lives, for we are taken out of the everyday world and our attention focuses on the other world that is always present but not always seen. A curtain is raised and we see things clearly for the first time; we know that there is another dimension to our existence.
It was not all joy, of course, back in that Kerry community where I grew up. We knew hardship through the Depression and the war, and food was rationed well into the 1950s. Hard times drove many from their land, and emigration was a curse that many local families had to learn to live with. But we were a close and neighbourly community. The local writer Peig Sayers (whom I knew as an old lady when as a child I visited her in the local hospital) put it like this:
We all helped each other, living in the shelter of each other. Everything that was coming dark upon us we would disclose … Friendship is the fast root in my heart; it is like a white rose in the wilderness.
The community in which I grew up had a strong sense of occasion, and we took our celebrations seriously. In those days – and this tradition still persists in some areas of the country – the people would hold religious services in their own houses. Different houses would take it in turn to hold ‘the stations’, as they were called, and all the neighbours would come. There would be great cleaning and decorating done in the station house in the weeks before the station, and then on the day there would be a mass held in the house, usually in the best room, and all the neighbours would gather in. Afterwards there were tea and cakes and music and dancing, and the festivities went on into the night. This tradition goes back to the Penal Laws, when the Catholic Church was suppressed, and people gathered secretly in private houses whenever a priest was available to say mass for them. In my childhood, it had become more of a community celebration, and the connection to Penal times is not often remembered.
In those days there were few cars. People walked or cycled, or travelled in pony and trap. I can remember travelling to weddings and christenings, wakes and funerals, under hedges dripping with wild fuchsia – which we called deora Dé (God’s tears). The tradition of ‘waking’ the dead – maintaining an all-night vigil in the house of a person who has died – was the norm in my youth, and is still quite common in Ireland, where the rituals and traditions of death are honoured. Irish people go to funerals not just of family members and close friends but of the relations of neighbours, colleagues and acquaintances, and the expression of sympathy and solidarity at times of bereavement is very much the norm. When I was a child, we did not say that a person had died. Rather we said that they were gone ar shlí na fírinne, which means on the way of truth. Far from being a euphemism, this turn of phrase was an acknowledgement of death as a natural part of the cycle of life, a transition to a new phase of beauty and harmony, not an event to be feared and resented.
Monumental changes have taken place in the Church in Ireland during my lifetime. When I was growing up in Lispole, in the 1940s and 1950s, churches were full for all the masses and holy days, and there were queues for confession on Saturdays.
The annual mission, with teams of priests coming round to preach fire and brimstone, were all well attended. Lispole was a sub-parish of Dingle. There were three priests in the Dingle parish – a canon and two curates. One of the curates was assigned to Lispole, and the canon went there sometimes. The priests were among the few who drove cars – usually Morris Minors. The canon was an elderly, wiry, friendly man, and he seemed to have responsibility for the funding of the churches.
When it came to the parish dues, the canon came to Lispole and he read out the names of the subscribers in order of the size of their subscription, beginning with the highest. One year he commented on the subscriptions, being severely critical of those who in his view had not subscribed enough, according to their means. I was a young child at the time. I remember waiting and listening, with a great fear, for what he would say about us. Fortunately he said nothing, but the adults were talking and being very annoyed and angry that the canon would do such a thing in church. But on the whole, the canon was liked. One of the curates took a particular interest in sports and the development of the sports field; the other curate was very speedy in speech and otherwise, and that included giving mass. Some of the women wore shawls, and this particular curate strongly disapproved of the shawl, and spoke about it from the altar to the annoyance of the women – who continued to wear the shawls. So at the annual procession on Corpus Christi he forbade women who wore shawls to walk in the procession. Many women took offence at this, but it was the beginning of the end of shawls in Dingle.