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Common Ground: How Missionaries Shape Ireland's Global Connections

04 Aug 2021
By Associate Professor Denis Linehan
Mary Robinson with Trocaire staff with mothers and children who are attending the Trócaire's Dollow Health Centre, Dollow, Somalia. Source: Jennifer O'Gorman/Trocaire https://bit.ly/3xrkmWH

Ireland’s recently won its bid for a temporary seat on the UN Security Council. This success offers insights into how the bitter experiences of colonialism can be recast to build global influence. 

For Ireland, their objective in making the bid was to “project their values.”  The Irish President Michael Higgins defined there as a wish “to distil critical ingredients of its own experience with colonisation and great hardship, to develop and share a vision of our world today, one that is rooted in empathy and defined by a spirit of partnership and co-operation.”

While Ireland’s overseas aid budget at .45 percent of its GDP is valuable, its colonial history, struggles for independence, and success in brokering peace in Northern Ireland seem to have been most effective in this round of voting.  The Irish government have decades of experience weaving overlapping memories of place and history into a national brand. Their strategy during the bid has been to mobilise their appeal to the global network of post-colonial states, with whom they claim many commonalities. The pitch is multifaceted and multi-directional. The national brand is flexible enough to build affinities with the Palestinian cause, which helped to shore up votes from Arab nations. When members of the African Union come to Dublin, official photographs were made in front of gilded portraits of colonial British Viceroys, a subtle reminder of the shared colonial history. Opportunities to produce this brand have been rarely missed. In Peru in 2017, on a state visit, the Irish president met the descendants of the Putumayo peoples, whose exploitation in the rubber plantations at the beginning of the 20th century was revealed internationally by the Irish nationalist Rodger Casement.   Indeed, rather than being a woolly concept, the success of the Irish bid demonstrates the value of this carefully crafted history of Ireland global relations. For instance, the Irish budget for its Security Council bid was €800,000, less than half that of the Canadian government.  The Canadians lost.

It is tempting to criticise the overly agile and sometimes chimeric qualities of the Irish national brand. However, the claims to solidarity and empathy are authentic, not least via the history of it missionaries, whose legacy – despite the rapidly changing post-catholic character of the state – has influenced how the Irish state operates in global development issues. However, there is some ambiguity about this relationship.  In the promotional videos made by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs as part of their bid for the Security Council seat, little and sometimes no mention was made of the missionary enterprise. Between 2011 and 2014, Ireland withdrew its ambassador to the Vatican over a conflict about their response to child abuse. In recent years, the Irish state has pressed through constitutional changes around abortion and LGBTQ+ rights that have weakened the associations between Catholic identity and national identity. However, despite sharp falls in religiosity, the Catholic Church still controls schools and has a firm place in Irish family rituals.

But even as there is an insurmountable rift between the Church’s and the Irish state perspective on social policy today, the genealogy of many of the values the state wants to project abroad – notably solidarity, partnership, and social justice – are reflected strongly in the Irish missionaries.  While the Irish diplomatic corps will insist on their secularity, and some may regard the Catholic connections too blursed to preserve, their ethical stance is shaped within the orbit of those legacies. The Irish state highlights the critical role of missionaries in its Africa Strategy, for instance.

The missionary connections have deep roots.  While the Irish diaspora is concentrated in the USA, the UK, and Australia, the missionary network has had a far more extensive geographical range over time. At its peak in the early 1980s, about 8,000 Irish Catholic missionaries dispersed over 80 countries, supported mainly from donations in Ireland, which was all the more remarkable given it small population that experienced widespread poverty.  Consequently, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs has always had an informal network of valuable missionary in-country contacts, who, in the context of a small island, were often friends, cousins, or old neighbours.  In addition, the activities of the missionaries greatly enlarged the Irish geographical imagination, drawing attention not just to exotic destinations but also places traumatised by famine, war, and environmental collapse. In the Philippines and Central America, missionaries engaged in campaigns for social justice, leading to their kidnapping, murder, and imprisonment, igniting public interest in international affairs in Ireland.  This outlook matched the interests of the Irish government, which was keen to express its identity inside the United Nations and cultivate a reputation for multilateralism.

The missionaries have had a profound impact on the international development NGO sector.  Concern Worldwide has its origins in missionary activity undertaken by the Holy Ghost Fathers during the Biafra War in West Africa in the 1960s. Trocaire, the charity representing the Conference of Irish Bishops, undertakes its international development work based on Catholic social teaching.  The Irish government’s overseas development agency, Irish Aid, is its largest institutional funder.

Another component of the missionary influence is more personal. There is no shortage of middle-aged decision-makers in governments worldwide with a personal connection to an Irish missionary teacher or nun. Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, the ex-prime-minister of Samoa – where the Irish opened a new embassy in 2019 – was educated in Auckland by the Marist Brothers at St Paul’s College, part of a whole network of schools set up Irish Catholic missionaries who came to New Zealand and Australia in the late 19th century.  When Fijian Foreign Minister Inia Seruiratu landed in Dublin to collaborate on a UN summit on small island and developing states – which helped consolidate Irish votes for the UN Security Council seat from Pacific island nations – the first point of common ground was a reference to Irish missionaries. The Columban Fathers, whose HQ is in County Fermanagh, can claim that over 50 Irish priests served in Oceania since the 1940s, who in addition to ministering the faith, made a significant contribution to development, notably low-cost housing in Fiji.

It was not always this way.  Like other European missionaries in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Irish missionaries benefited from colonialism, expanding into regions in Asia and Africa occupied by Britain and France. Up to the 1950s, some Irish missionaries had a less than enlightened grasp of the indigenous cultures they encountered. In missionary magazines, books, and films, the story was not about partnership and solidarity but pagans, black babies, and witchdoctors. But by the early 1960s, the Irish had largely shed these perspectives.  Having consolidated their churches and developed a valuable presence in health and education, they widely supported independence movements. Irish nationalist and anti-colonial sentiments fell quickly into line with Vatican II’s strategy to accommodate decolonisation. Soon solidarity with oppressed peoples became a notable characteristic of the Irish missionary reputation. In the 1970s, the colonial regime in Rhodesia expelled the Irish Bishop Donal Lamont for his support of the armed resistance of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). In El Salvador, Chile, and Brazil, Irish values combined easily with Liberation Theology to drive campaigns for social justice, convictions which have not dissipated.

In recent times, the Irish government has carefully curated these histories. With an eye on the national brand, in 2019, the Embassy of Ireland in South Africa produced a documentary that traced the anti-apartheid activism of Irish missionaries and their contribution to justice, health, and education. Authentic Irish voices, mixed in with archive testimonies from Kofi Anan and Nelson Mandela praising the resilience of the missionaries in standing up for justice is gold-dust in making the case to a new generation of African leaders that Ireland stands for solidarity and empathy. But buried within official accounts like these is also the weight of bitter analogies between the history of imprisonment of political prisoners in notorious H-Blocks of Long Kesh (now demolished) and Robbin Island (now a National Monument), affinities.  From some African perspectives, Northern Ireland can still be seen as an unresolved colonial occupation.

About 850 Irish missionaries are still scattered around the world. Most are over the age of 60.  By the end of the decade, their numbers will probably fall to about 200.  This decline does not mean that they are a spent force.  The Irish missionary hub, Misean Cara, maintains a granular survey of the 88 missionary organisations it supports, working in 51 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, promoting recognition of their humanitarian work. Back in Ireland, even in their 80s, many retired missionaries are vital and steely-eyed, ready to share their experiences with famine, child soldiers, and HIV/AIDS.  Theirs is a collective voice tempered by the paradox of being globally engaged but displaced from the current focus of Irish society.  Time will tell if their legacy will stand as a counterpoint to the traumas of sexual abuse in the archipelago of orphanages, Mother and Baby homes, and boarding schools controlled by the church during the 20th century.

Even as the Irish Catholic missionaries are fading from the scene, the plans to double the Irish diplomatic footprint by 2025 will continue to be eased with the missionary connections.  During the Irish Security Council bid, the slick nation branding that portrayed different versions of an ethical and empathetic global island still benefited from their legacy. Their impacts linger in the memory of many thousands of people across a vast geography. They give the island of Ireland a presence in places far from its shores and offer a telling example of how the subtle and differential use of solidarity and empathy can be harvested as leverage in international relations.

Denis Linehan is Associate Professor in Human Geography at University College Cork in Ireland.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.