Priest back from Australia
RATHNEW native Fr Pat Doran is spending the summer in Ireland on a break from the mission in Australia, where he has served since 2000.
Now in his eighties, the Holy Ghost missionary will be returning to Australia in September.
One of seven sons of the late John Doran and his wife Lill (née Quinn), Pat had always wanted to become a priest. He particularly wanted to serve ‘on the missions’, having read about Irish missionaries in the religious magazines that had been a feature of his Wicklow childhood.
After primary school in Rathnew, he went to St Joseph’s De La Salle College in Wicklow town, a two-mile walk from the family home.
He began an association with the Spiritans when he transferred to Rockwell College in Co Tipperary. From there, it was on to the Spiritan Novitiate, which was also then located in Tipperary, and later to Kimmage in Dublin to study Philosophy and Theology. He was ordained in 1959.
Like so many other ‘Holy Ghost men’ of that era, Fr Pat spent his early years as a missionary priest in Nigeria. Though a bout of TB saw him come home to recuperate, he had returned to West Africa some time before the outbreak of the Biafran War, and he remained there assisting the humanitarian relief efforts until, like many other Irish missionaries who were deported or banned from returning, replacement missions had to be found for them.
In Fr Pat’s case, after a period spent teaching in Ireland, Canada would become his new home and he served with youth and in the area of vocations after moving there.
In 1974, he returned to Africa, this time to Malawi in the southern half of the continent. It was there that he suffered post-traumatic stress, which affected many who had been in Biafra and who were expected to simply get on with life afterwards.
Once he had recovered, Fr Doran was appointed to Papua New Guinea and he retains very warm memories of his decade-and-a-half in that country. He was delighted to again visit there last year. He has now spent an even longer period in Australia, where he is one of four Spiritans from Ireland – and he is not finished yet!