Nano Nagle was born Honora Nagle in Ballygriffin, near Mallow, County Cork. She was the daughter of Garret Nagle, a landowner and one of the wealthiest Catholics in the country. Educated privately in the paternal mansion, she and her sister were sent to be ‘finished’ at a French convent, as was the custom for rich Catholic girls. France was a good choice for the Nagles: they had many important social connections in Paris, including Nano’s father’s cousin, Sir Richard Nagle, who had been the erstwhile speaker of the ‘Patriot Parliament’ held by James II in 1689, and who was then secretary of state for Ireland. After school, the well-dowered and attractive young Nano stayed on in Paris for several years, mixing with high society and having a lively time of it.
Nano realised she had a vocation at an unlikely moment. Returning home at dawn from an all-night ball, she was sleepily looking out of her carriage window when she saw a group of desperately poor Parisians waiting patiently outside a church to hear Mass. In order to worship God, these people had arisen even earlier than they had to and had fasted, even though they had a long day’s backbreaking work ahead of them. Their faith was a revelation to Nano; she immediately swore to reject her wealthy society background and devote her life to the poor.
Returning to Ireland after her father’s death in 1746, Nano determined that she would make a Catholic education available to the poor. But the eighteenth century was a time of virulent anti-Catholicism and Nano came up against the Penal Laws. Born out of the ever-present Protestant fear of Catholic rebellion, these laws were designed to disempower the Catholic majority: they were not allowed to vote, hold public office, buy land or maintain long-term leases, marry Protestants, practise law, own weapons, join the services, or receive a Catholic education. The only legal education was that provided by the Church of Ireland, and even that was not generally available to the poor. Disheartened, Nano returned to France and entered a convent.
In the convent, Nano was haunted by voices calling her back to help her people. She sought the advice of her confessor and between them they resolved that God was indicating her life’s purpose: to work among her own people in her own country. In 1749, with some trepidation, Nano sailed once again for Ireland.
When she reached Cork, Nano went to live with her brother and his family. Soon she had secretly started a small school of about thirty girls in a mud shack on Cobh Lane. Under the pretence of going to chapel to worship, Nano was actually going to the shack each day to teach. As she commented in a letter written nearly twenty years later, her ‘design had to be kept a profound secret’ – after all, what she was doing was totally illegal.
The cat got out of the bag one day when a poor man came to the Nagles’s house and announced to Nano’s brother that he wanted his daughter to go to ‘Mrs Nagle’s school’. Nano’s brother was shocked at what Nano had been up to, but his initial opposition soon turned to strong support, and within a year the thirty students had become 200. By 1769 five schools had been set up for girls and two for boys. All the children were taught how to read and write and how to do basic maths, and they were all educated in their own religion.
Nano kept this up year after year, maintaining the schools from her own money and collecting door to door when the money ran out. As a helper she had Dr Francis Moylan, later bishop of Kerry and then of Cork, who had been ordained in Toulouse and was recently returned to Ireland. The two of them decided to expand the operation and, in 1767, they approached the Ursulines in Paris to start a foundation in Ireland – with French-trained Irishwomen. After a few false starts, and some understandable reluctance on the part of the Ursulines, they succeeded. In May 1771 four Irish novices and one fully professed nun landed at Cobh. Four months later they entered the convent that Nano had specially built for them.
But there was a hitch. Nano felt the Ursulines needed to modify their closed-order rule so they could visit the poor in their own homes, but the nuns themselves felt unable or unwilling to do this. In addition, they were more interested in educating middle-class children in the conventional way, as Nano herself had been educated, whereas for Nano the raison d’être of the schools was to educate the poor. This situation obviously wasn’t working.
Nano’s response to the problem was to start another, wholly original community, whose aims were related to hands-on care of the poor. In 1777, Nano and three other women took simple vows and started the Institute of Charitable Instruction, which later became the Order of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They were professed, adopted a uniform of black dresses and black-ribboned caps, and entered their new convent on Christmas Eve of that year. Their aim was to become ‘the servants of the poor’; their first act was to throw a banquet and personally serve fifty local paupers.
Nano was only in her forties when she confirmed her vows, but she did not have long to live. She had always suffered from poor eyesight and a chronically weak chest and both these conditions were worsening all the time. In spite of this, she and her companions ceaselessly travelled from school to school and visited the sick and the old in their own homes.
Nano became known as the Lady with the Lantern because she often worked long into the night, and it was said there wasn’t a garret in Cork she did not know. Nano worked on like this for eight years. One of her last acts, in 1783, was to establish a home for the elderly poor.
Nano eventually died of an inflammation of the lungs at the age of fifty-six, and was buried in the Ursuline convent graveyard at Douglas Street, Cork. By 1900 her seven schools had grown to fifty in Ireland alone, and there were others in North America, Britain, Australasia and India. Her foundation spread to become one of the most respected in the teaching profession. The cause of Nano Nagle for beatification is now being pursued.