The women in this piece, first published in the Irish Catholic, entered OLA mission across seven decades, on two continents, in circumstances that had little in common except one thing.
Ardfoyle Convent c.1945
Frances Geary grew up in a house full of noise and people, seven girls and six boys gathering in the kitchen each evening for the family Rosary, full of laughter and what she called its many trimmings. The Sisters who taught her brought a different kind of life into view, and when missionary priests visited the school and spoke about the need for men and women willing to go to Africa, something in her responded. Her older sister Lillie had already entered Ardfoyle Convent in Ballintemple, Cork, taking the name Sr Dominica, and Frances felt called to follow her. Leaving that kitchen, that family, was lonely, but as she wrote herself, she eventually took the step, entering the OLA congregation in 1931 and sailing for Nigeria five years later.
In 1918, a girl from Ballyporeen attended school in England and fell in love with the idea of religious life. She was particularly drawn to a nun who carried a large white handkerchief. The woman was tall and moved through the school with an authority the girl could not name but that immediately captured her imagination. She dreamed of being just like her. It would be years later, when she visited Ardfoyle with her five-year-old brother Sean, that she made the decision to join the OLA. Coming up the avenue, they saw the Sisters outside praying the Rosary, one of them particularly friendly and visibly happy among them, and Hannah O’Farrell left knowing she would return. After making her first profession in 1939, the newly formed Sr Eymard sailed for Nigeria and spent the next twenty-four years teaching in Lagos.
The Certainty That Persisted
Sr Bernadette Flynn, who passed away in January 2021, was twenty years old when she opened the Irish Press and saw a photograph of a group of Sisters going to Africa. It was one image among several vocational announcements on the page, but seeing this image, something inside her went quiet and certain in the same moment. She threw the paper away, not wanting to acknowledge what she already knew. For about a week she tried to ignore it, but the certainty persisted. She went in search of the discarded paper, moving through the house until she found it. The picture was torn but the address was still legible. She wrote that same day. Nobody around her understood it. The family doctor told her she would be banging her head off the wall. Her parish priest had no interest in hearing about it, certain she was supposed to get married. Her mother, when she told her, said: “Oh child, you won’t live one week out there.” Bernadette, who would spend decades in Nigeria before returning to Ireland in her later years, had never heard of the OLA Sisters or Ardfoyle. She did not know where it was, had no image in her mind of what she was going toward, but none of the warnings touched the place inside her that had already answered. She left for Africa in 1963 and, in her own words, never looked back.
The missions those women crossed continents to build became, in time, the ground in which new vocations grew.
Bridget Okonye came into the world in 1970 in a maternity hospital in Agbor, Nigeria, run by the OLA Sisters. She was delivered by Sr Celestine Sheridan into a life that would, without her knowing it, follow the same path. Her father named her Bridget and she was baptised in the parish church by an SMA missionary. In her final year at the OLA secondary school, Marymount College, she watched the Sisters walk each morning from their community house to the hospital, and knew, with a certainty that surprised her, that she was being called in the same way to reach those who needed her most. After completing her schooling she entered the congregation and was admitted into the postulate by Sr Bernadette Flynn, who had left Ireland for Nigeria forty years before Bridget was born, and whose presence had helped shape the community, the school, and the hospital that had formed her. The call had made a full circle, though neither woman could have known, at the moment of its passing, how far it reached.
Across Generations
The Elmina and Cape Coast Communities pictured in 1928
Sr Mary Rita O Mahoney and Sr Eileen Cummens on the Ocasion of Sr Mary Ritas 70th Jubilee (2025)
The image that had drawn Bernadette Flynn across the world had its counterpart in other lives.
Sr Eileen Cummins, who entered the OLA in 1960, has kept a clear image all her life of a photograph in the congregation’s magazine, Tidings. The photo captures a Sister, dressed in white from head to toe, capped with a broad helmet, sitting under a palm tree teaching a group of African children. The image was from the Gold Coast, now Ghana. “I wanted to be there in that situation,” she says. “I am sure that was the seed of my own OLA missionary vocation.”
That willingness to answer, carried across generations and cultures, became visible with particular clarity at a General Chapter in Rome in 2013. Eileen Cummins, by then more than fifty years an OLA Sister, was in a working group with Ghanaian and Nigerian sisters, discussing new calls into mission lands. Among the possibilities was an invitation into the Central African Republic, a country in the middle of acute political crisis. She raised a word of caution. The situation was dangerous, she said. They should go carefully.
There was a silence. Then two of the African sisters responded. They pointed out, quietly and directly, that Irish Sisters had gone into equally challenging and dangerous missions in West Africa in the early years, that many had died within months of arrival, and that the African sisters were ready to answer the same call. Sr Eileen reflects on the exchange to this day. She says that what moved her was recognising “the core of our OLA missionary identity and charism is so alive, present and active among the next generation of younger African sisters.” The congregation now has four Sisters in the Central African Republic.
This year, as the OLA celebrates one hundred and fifty years of mission, that exchange stands as one of the clearest signs of what the congregation has become. The call that drew Irish women to West Africa in the nineteenth century has passed across cultures and continents and generations, and it continues to draw women today who recognise in it the same thing those first Sisters recognised: a way of being in the world that places them alongside those most often overlooked, in places where that work is most needed and least visible.
The geography of that call has changed across one and a half centuries, contracting in some places, expanding in others, but the willingness to go where the need is greatest remains.
Mary Rita O’Mahony entered the OLA congregation in 1953 and went to Ghana in 1959. She was still there in the early 1980s when severe drought and economic collapse pushed the country into famine. The community in Kenyasi suffered alongside those around them, short of food, short of medicine, developing open ulcers on their legs. She spent long hours in queues for petrol, roaming the country looking for supplies for the school and its boarders. Speaking recently, Sr Mary Rita reflects that those years in Kenyasi were the happiest of her mission life, despite suffering illness and malnutrition. “For once I felt at one with the people around me: both they and we had very little. For the first time I felt really bonded with the truly poor.” In September 2025, she celebrated seventy years of religious life. Asked about her calling, she was unequivocal. It had always been absolute.