CONVENT LIFE WAS ‘RIGID’

While the Presentation Convent in Mitchelstown was open for 43 years, many nuns spent time and passed their careers, either wholly or partly, behind the doors of the magnificent building. Now sadly ruined, the memories and stories of the Convent are kept alive by the reminiscences of many, including the nuns who lived and worked there.

During this last year, the producers of the Nano Nagle Place Podcast sat down with Sr Annunciata Forde, who joined the Presentation Order when she came through the doors of Mitchelstown Convent in October 1959. Speaking with interviewer Greg Canty, she told how she joined the order just after doing her Leaving Cert, at about the age of 18 and a half. With three aunts all attached to a religious order, she had thought about joining the Sisters of Mercy, but fears of a life spent nursing put her off. One of her aunts was a Presentation nun, who had entered in Mitchelstown.

“Every time I visited, though it was not that often, I was very impressed with the welcome. There was something within me, kind of calling me,” she said.

Sr Annunciata did her novitiate in Midleton over two years, and after her Profession returned to Mitchelstown, attending UCC to do her degree and higher diploma.

Joining the order with one other lady, now deceased, on October 7th in 1959, she ‘closed the door behind her’, saying ‘goodbye to your family, and home, and neighbours and everybody’.

Speaking with Mr Canty, Sr Annunciata says the enormity of her decision dawned on her, and admits to feeling ‘lonely about leaving it all behind. But I suppose there was an element of, doing something. That I was answering a call as well, and there was peace in it, I think, that’s how I’d describe it now.’

“Coming through the door I was quite lonely alright, but I was determined not to show my parents and sisters how I felt. I think that night when I went to bed I cried, I’m sure, and cried many a night after it. But I suppose the whole thing was such an adventure as well. Maybe it was harder on the parents at home, who were left with this break in the family. They hadn’t the kind of adventure that those of us who entered had, facing into a very new world.”

“It wasn’t as final as, for example, my aunt the Ursuline who went to Australia. My father never remembered her, but he remembered as a little boy that a letter would come in the post, and his mother would spend the rest of the day crying, but he wouldn’t know why. The heroic things people did in those days was extraordinary. Life was very Godcentred, and the faith was very strong, in a way. It’s extraordinary to compare it to these days entirely.”

With no phone to easily contact home, she was allowed to write home once a month. She did not question the rules: “To write more often, it just didn’t enter the situation. You took the rules for granted. You didn’t question it.”

Sr Annunciata and another sister went to the school in Presentation as postulants, a ‘real thrill’ to be teaching the kids, saying: “We were a novelty to them too, because we were dressed differently to the sisters, and young children like that were excited by anything different.”

Later in UCC, the nuns who were studying to be teachers did not mix with the other students. Spending time in the ‘nuns’ room’ between classes, she stayed in a hostel, La Retraite, with 50 or 60 others, and they were allowed to go for a walk on a Sunday.

Life back in the Convent in Mitchelstown was ‘rigid’, with classes all day.

“And then during the holidays, things were much freer. I remember there was a summer house at the top of the garden, you could look out at the Galtee Mountains. It was a beautiful view, and we’d sit out there; again you’d probably be doing a bit of sewing, or you could read. My favourite time of the year was the summer. I liked gardening, there was plenty of scope there”.

At one point, “A couple of years before the Vatican Council, Bishop Ahern had given us permission to buy a summer house in Ballycotton. And you got two weeks in Ballycotton in the summer, a huge breakthrough! It was very relaxing, and free to walk around.”

HISTORY OF THE CONVENT

In the podcast episode, Sr Annunciata gives a fascinating account of how the convent came to be through the wealth of Angelina Gould, a lady who entered the convent in Doneraile with a dowry of over £60,000. Her inheritance was divided out, and ‘materially she was responsible for the foundation of 12 Presentation and Mercy convents in the diocese of Cloyne.’

In 1845, Fr Morgan O’Brien was sent as Parish Priest to Mitchelstown.

“Mitchelstown was in a terrible way at the time. The Kingstons were the landlords, and they had treated their tenant farmers very badly. As well as that, there was a lot of poverty in the area but they built this huge castle for themselves and had a wall built all around it to protect them from the riff-raff, I suppose, but it cost them an awful lot of money and they began to have financial problems themselves.”

“There was a parish priest there about 20 years before Fr O’Brien who sided with the Kingstons in every way, and that angered the people naturally. But the Kingstons had given him a site for a new church in the parish, high above looking onto the town. A beautiful site. He began building there but the people refused to contribute to it, because of the Kingston connection. So, the church was built, just walls and roof, and left there for over 20 years. People had turned against religion and everything because of that.”

When Fr O’Brien came in 1845, there was a population in the town of 5,000, according to Sr Annunciata, ‘and a survey showed there was 1,800 people starving, and the famine hadn’t really taken grip at this time, and a terrible problem with alcohol consumption.’

“When he came into the area and saw the parish he was to inherit, he knelt on the steps of the hotel and prayed to Our Lady to help him to survive there. He came in ’45, and ’47 was one of the worst years of the famine.”

The site of the Convent was eventually bought from the Kingstons with some of the money from Angelina Gould and on 14th June, 1852 Elizabeth Tuite (Sr Aloysius), came from the convent in Doneraile with two others, Claire McGrath and Xavier Roche, to the new convent in Mitchelstown.

“The rejoicing in the town was beyond anything. Xavier Roche recalled they had fires across the Galtee mountains to welcome the people. They had tar barrels and fire in the streets to welcome them. As soon as the pony and trap reached the town, the men took the trap from the horses and took it on their shoulders and took them up to the convent.”

According to the interview, a school was opened shortly thereafter, with 500 pupils registered on the first day; of that number, just 60 could read or write. A month after there was 600 on the register. Five years after opening, Sisters Claire and Xavier returned to Doneraile, as so many Sisters had joined the convent in Mitchelstown in the meantime.

Speaking of the connection the Presentation Convent had with the lay people, Sr Annunciata said it amazed her.

“Even though it was closed, there was a bond between the Convent and the town, and you knew the families. I suppose they came to the Convent a lot and talked with the Sisters; it’s amazing how much the Sisters knew without ever going outside the gate.”

“They knew the families intimately, and even later on in life many families would come back, very often people who’d gone to England, would come back and come to the Convent to say how much the Sisters had done for their family. Different Sisters would be involved with different families, all their needs. It was extraordinary the amount that went on.”

“Even when I entered first, every day there was cocoa or some hot drink given out to people at a break, and scones and things like that, and the numbers that availed of them (was huge). And Mitchelstown is a very cold place in the wintertime, and it would do you good to see them with their hot drink and that, and then they’d go out to play. And when past pupils come back sometimes, these are the kinds of things they recall.”

Sr Annunciata went on to teach in Zimbabwe for three years, during the time of Robert Mugabe’s reign over the country. Speaking of the hunger she witnessed amongst the children there, she was told not to reprimand pupils who were chewing in class, ‘as they may be chewing a piece of paper just to get away from the gnawing feeling of hunger.’

Agreeing that ‘children are the same everywhere’, she does point out that the children in Zimbabwe were more eager to learn. If she met them on her way home in the evening, and asked how they got on in school they would say, ‘We got knowledge, Sister!’, ‘whereas our own couldn’t care less!’

She returned to Ireland in 2007, in the middle of the Celtic Tiger, when ‘things were beginning to crack’.

“Oh listen, it was unbelievable. It’s almost revolting. When you see the way money is spent, one of the things that struck me, that autumn I came back, is when I saw pumpkins around the place with faces cut out of them, and a pumpkin would be such precious food in Zimbabwe at the time. It would upset you, to see the waste of food and that.”

CLOSURE

The Convent in Mitchelstown closed on 9th December 2002, a ‘sad day’, says Sr Annunciata

“When you came through the doors of Mitchelstown, could you have dreamt of that place closing?”, asked Greg.

“No, no. It would have been impossible to think along those lines. It was a vibrant full house, with young sisters and old sisters. And you would assume that cycle would continue.”

Commenting on the rapidly evolving world that has emerged since the