Madam, - One of the great unsung achievements of the Irish nation has been the tens of thousands of men and women who became missionaries and went abroad taking their faith with them. At any point in the past 200 years, in the most unlikely of places, in the farthest corners of civilisation, I'd wager you'd find a Father O'Reilly or a Sister Mahoney being a teacher, a nurse or what we would now call an aid worker. They worked in what we would consider intolerable conditions, to achieve an over-arching principle: the propagation of their faith.
With the truly terrible press the Roman Catholic Church has received in recent times and the consequent loss of respect and prestige for its clergy, it's sometimes difficult for us to appreciate the esteem in which Irish clergy are held abroad, even now. Signal figures of our time were educated and influenced by such missionaries. Steve Biko was taught to play rugby by Irish Jesuits. Gregory Peck was, he admitted, formed by the influence of "tough Irish nuns".
Irish clerics did not follow in the wake of conquering imperialists, unlike the clerics that waded through the flotsam and jetsam left behind by the likes of Pizarro or Cortes. The empire to which they could have been closest to, the British, was institutionally hostile to their faith. I am convinced that one of the main reasons for the store of goodwill for the Irish when we travel abroad is the legacy of these, our most selfless of emigrants.
Two things have put me in mind of them recently. The first was the death of Bishop Donal Lamont, whose obituary appeared in The Irish Times on Saturday, August 23rd. Bishop Lamont was a member of the great order of the Carmelites, one of the glories of the middle ages and along with the other four mendicant orders of the church, an organisation that formidably influenced the formation of western civilisation. A native of Antrim, he went as a young priest to what is now Zimbabwe. While there he vehemently opposed the white racist regime. Threatened with imprisonment he raised global consciousness of the plight of the native African population. He had his citizenship revoked, ultimately being deported from the country. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1978. In 1979 Kenya issued a stamp in his honour to commemorate what he had done for the native people of Africa.
The second thing that brought these missionaries to my mind was the publication of the points requirements for various college and university courses. A veritable cottage industry has grown up around the "points race". Points requirements for the most prestigious and popular of courses seems to have skyrocketed.
Eventually the annual August frenzy of the "points race" will fade from the newspapers and the doctors, lawyers, vets and pharmacists of the future will sober up. In the interim, I wonder how many of these post-Leaving Cert students would have even thought for a moment about following the example of Donal Lamont? For better or for worse the answer is very few indeed, if any.
A chapter in our history is slowly closing. The well of people willing to be missionaries has almost entirely dried up. By way of a requiem for a way of life that has nearly disappeared, I think we should honour the good missionaries, one of the best types of Irish emigrant and specifically the well-lived principled life of Donal Lamont. - Yours, etc.,
J.O. RYAN, Cloonmore, Carracastle, Co Mayo.