When Sr Kathleen McGarvey OLA stood in the grounds of Ireland’s new Embassy building in Abuja on 19 March this year, she was there as a guest of the Embassy – but the connection she represented is older than any building.
The congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles was founded in 1876. Two years later, our Sisters arrived in Nigeria – the first women religious in the country. In this jubilee year, as we celebrate 150 years since our foundation, the OLA presence in Nigeria is almost as old as the congregation itself. Our Sisters settled in Lagos, opened schools, and over the following decades extended our work steadily north and east, alongside SMA missionaries across five provinces. That work continued through the twentieth century and continues today.
The occasion was the formal opening of Ireland’s new Embassy building in Abuja, its largest capital investment on the African continent, by Minister Jack Chambers TD. Among the ceremonies was the planting of three trees in the Embassy grounds. Each carried a different intention. The first was planted by Minister Chambers himself, in recognition of the partnership between Ireland and Nigeria. The second was planted by a family member of Judas Nimmyel, who had served as secretary at the Embassy until his death last year, and whose tree stands now in remembrance of all who have been part of Team Ireland in Nigeria, local and posted, living and gone.
The third tree was planted by Archbishop Michael Crotty, Apostolic Nuncio to Nigeria, together with Sr Kathleen McGarvey OLA. Archbishop Crotty is himself Irish, from Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, and the first Irish person to serve as Apostolic Nuncio to Nigeria. That detail is not incidental. The bonds between Ireland and Nigeria, built through generations of missionaries, religious Sisters, priests, and laypeople, run deep enough that they continue to find expression in ways that are still new. The tree planted by Archbishop Crotty and Sr Kathleen was in memory of the Irish missionaries who served in Nigeria, and whose legacy, as the ceremony acknowledged, continues.
Sr Kathleen was invited because of the relationship OLA has built with the Irish Embassy in Nigeria over many years, a relationship of mutual respect and genuine support for our mission work in the country. Her place at the third tree, alongside the Vatican’s representative to Nigeria, was a reflection of how deep that Irish-Nigerian connection runs – built by the Sisters who came in 1878, and by every generation of OLA women who continued that work after them.
