At 22 years old, Sister Ailbe, from Co Tipperary, packed her bags and embarked on a steamer to west Africa in 1965. After five days she arrived in Dakar, Senegal, before boarding a train across the Sahelian plains towards Bamako.
She remembers a “feeling of panic, being lost and thinking: ‘Where am I going’?” As the crowded train pulled into the remote town of Tambacounda in 45 degree heat, the young Irish woman stepped into her new reality.
Pointing to the entrance of the town convent, she says: “I walked through those gates and fainted.” The heat has become bearable over the decades since her arrival, she says.
Beaming, she waves to a group of young Senegalese children who pass through the gates on their way to the school and calls “Salut” in the Tipperary accent she has retained.
Born Winifred Ryan in Upperchurch, Sr Ailbe first left home at 17 to join a French congregation called the Sisters of St Joseph of Annecy. She was one of thousands of Irish women who left the country in the 20th century in service of the Catholic Church. Today, she is one of a small number of Irish sisters remaining in west Africa.
“I said I think God is asking this of me … and I don’t want to disappoint him, so I’ll try,” she says.
For young Irish women of her generation, religious life offered something rare: independence, education and travel.
“There was no question for me about going home. I was going to the missions; that’s where I was going, that didn’t move, that didn’t get shattered at all.”
Over six decades, Ailbe and the sisters developed the area’s first secondary school for girls, a primary school, a skills centre and a boarding house for girls from rural communities. This is a region where the majority continue to live below the poverty line.
“Being a missionary to me meant you’re with the people, you are out for the people … for better or for worse … it’s like a covenant.”
Although Ireland’s missionary tradition dates back centuries, the modern wave increased after independence when thousands of religious travelled to Africa, Asia and Latin America to establish schools, hospitals, clinics and churches. Missionaries occupied a unique place in the Irish national imagination and, by the 1960s, estimates suggest about 6,000 Irish Catholic missionary personnel were working across Africa.
Today, that pipeline has almost dried up, as Ireland became more secular and wealthier, and revelations of abuse eroded trust in the Church. Small numbers remain in Senegal, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Now, they pass the torch to African sisters, the continent with the fastest-growing Catholic population in the world.
In this region, Bishop Joseph Shanahan is regarded as one of the trailblazers. Arriving in Nigeria in 1902 with the Holy Ghost Fathers, he established the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary in 1928, which became a blueprint for the region. In the following three decades, the number of Nigerian Catholics jumped from 2,000 to 210,000.
Many missionaries dedicated decades of their lives to expanding access to education, healthcare and learning local languages.
However, some scholars argue that in the early 20th century missionary work often operated within the structures of European colonialism and, in some cases, contributed to the suppression of local languages and spiritual traditions.
Dr Fiona Bateman, of the University of Galway, whose research interests include the Irish foreign missions in the 20th century, says early missionary magazines reinforced an image of Africa as a place of “darkness and hopelessness”. She adds that campaigns such as “a penny for the black babies” collected funds for missionary practice while perpetrating racial and colonialist stereotypes.
“Children would send in their pennies … It’s really surreal reading,” she says of the periodicals.
And yet education was central to the sisters’ work, Bateman adds.
“When Catholic boys grew up, they needed educated Catholic girls to marry,” she says. “The priests couldn’t educate girls, so there was a need for nuns.”
Historian Denis Linehan of University College Cork describes a “double positioning” of the Irish, who historically suffered from British colonial rule but also participated in colonial dynamics.
What did you do if you were young, Irish and idealistic 60 years ago? Join the missions
“In the 20s and 30s, the Irish were just basically taking their knowledge of Africa and the Orient from a European, Eurocentric point of view, where there was no kind of appreciation of indigenous knowledge,” he says. Early depictions of Africa often focused on travellers encountering “wild people”, with the “witch doctor” portrayed as a symbol of Satan, he adds.
As empires fell and African nations became independent, attitudes changed and, Linehan argues, Irish missionaries were “signed up to decolonisation” by the 60s.
In St Joseph of Cluny congregation in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Sr Teresa McKeon sits stoically in an upholstered red wooden chair of the kind found in sacristies across Ireland. Photographs of her celebrating 70 years of service line the walls. A box of Barry’s tea sits close by.
“Don’t take everything as Gospel,” she says with a wink, as she consults a notebook with notes from past students to jog her memory.
But she vividly remembers when Sierra Leone gained independence. She joined Milton Margai, then the country’s chief minister, in Freetown to celebrate the end of British colonial rule on April 27th, 1961.
“It was like Ireland that morning … When the Irish left the British,” she says.
Unprompted, the lyrics of Sierra Leone’s national anthem tumble out of her. Closing her eyes, she starts to sing:
“We raise up our hearts and our voices up high.”
Her voice crescendos with the end of the song.
“The land that I love – Sierra Leone.” She finishes grandly, her arms held above her head, tossing her head back laughing.
Having been among the first women to earn a mathematics degree from University College Dublin, Sr Teresa arrived in Sierra Leone in 1954. She spent decades as a teacher and later a principal of St Joseph’s Secondary School. At 96, she has lived through seismic events including the country’s civil war and Ebola outbreak.
“I love the people,” she says. “I came to the people, I stayed with the people, and I would not leave the people.” She became a Sierra Leonean citizen in 2022.
Sr Fidelma Maguire left north Leitrim at the age of 18. After training as a social worker in Britain, she arrived in Senegal in 1980 with one suitcase to join Ailbe’s congregation. Today she runs a boarding house for 60 girls in Kédougou, near Senegal’s border with Mali and Guinea. She calls herself their house mother.
“I’m very pleased when a girl gets to the end of her studies,” she says. “Especially when you see the battle she’s had.” She explains that the region faces unique challenges including instability from neighbouring conflicts, human trafficking, prostitution and exploitation related to illegal gold mining.
When Sr Fidelma arrived in Senegal, the emphasis of the sisters’ work had already shifted to partnership and exchange. Reflecting on her health work in remote areas during malaria epidemics and outbreaks of river blindness, she says the communities faced material hardship but were “culturally rich”.
Irish missionaries’ heroism and selflessness abroad is often overlooked today
In the early 1980s, about 5,600 Irish Catholic missionaries were working in more than 80 countries. The following decade brought revelations of systemic physical, emotional and sexual abuse within the church in Ireland.
In Nigeria, Sr Kathleen McGarvey of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles was early in her career when the scandals broke. At 58, she may be the youngest Irish sister left in west Africa.
“It was a big shock and painful for everybody,” she says – a sentiment all the sisters interviewed agree upon.
“I think it was a real call to the Church that it had to transform and had to change.”
“God is bigger than the Church … the Church is an instrument,” Sr Kathleen adds.
In the simple chapel in Tambacounda, Sr Ailbe sits alone reflecting as the speckled, equatorial sunlight filters through the window. Her tremoring hand holds a Bible bound in local wax fabric.
“We’re here to be witnesses of what Christianity is all about: to love one another, to unite everybody, to form a chain, not to convert and baptise,” she says.
In her apron decorated with Senegalese buses and local baobab trees, she makes her way to greet the children. Pupils stand and smile as she enters a classroom. Of the 58 children, only nine are Christian. More than 95 per cent of Senegal’s population is Muslim.
As the only sub-region in sub-Saharan Africa with an overall Muslim majority, interfaith dialogue is necessary in west Africa. With a theology doctorate focused on the subject, Sr Kathleen founded the Interfaith Council of Muslim and Christian Women’s Associations. Throughout her career, she has worked in parts of Nigeria’s northern states that have faced decades of deadly religious and ethnic conflict. “Giving a voice to women both within their communities and beyond – that gives me energy,” she says.
In the 21st century, the Church began to decline in Ireland. The number of nuns in Ireland fell by 23 per cent between 2002 and 2012, according to the Vatican.
In the dimly lit kitchen in Tambacounda, African sisters and Sr Ailbe sing psalms together, drowning out the hum of mosquitoes as they prepare a simple stew.
One of them is Senegalese Sr Marie Pierre Ndiaye who joined the congregation in 2000. She was trained by Srs Fidelma and Ailbe.
“Ailbe passed on that [her way] with symbols to us when we were novices,” she says. “It can be a flower, a stone but it is telling me something.”
“I think it’s from her Celtic culture.”
As Sr Marie Pierre walks through the Tambacounda market, haggling in the local Wolof language, it is hard to imagine the same was possible for the Irish missionaries a century ago.
“Our European sisters were very open, very kind and they respected us. They trusted us and they passed on what they had received.”
Sr Marie Pierre first met Sr Ailbe as a young child in the parish.
“Ailbe was driving a motorbike in the streets,” she says, chuckling, as she recalled her “veil flying in the air”.
Sr Ailbe insists the vehicle was the most practical way to get around. Even today, Tambacounda is more than 10 hours by bus to the capital, Dakar, and tarmacked roads outside the urban areas are rare. Flicking through a chunky photo album, she lists the villages she would frequent, a sewing machine under her arm, to make clothes for children.
Sr Ailbe’s bright eyes linger on a photograph of two smiling young Senegalese girls, Sharmaine and Mary Agnes, in matching blue and black dyed fabric. “My first two novices,” she says proudly.
Turning to her computer, she shows videos of ceremonies and celebrations featuring more and more African faces over time. As of 2024, 14 per cent of the world’s professed sisters are African.
Reflecting on her life’s work, she says: “It’s to work in such a way that the day you’re not there, the work goes on.”
“We’re here to … as we say in French: ‘former les formateurs’, or ‘train the trainer’,” she says.
In 2026, Sr Marie Pierre was elected superior general of the congregation founded in France in 1650. She is the first African to hold the role.
In the church in Tambacounda, voices sing out the Gospel acclamation. Sr Ailbe embraces members of the congregation she has known for almost her whole adult life. Africa is now home to 288 million Catholics, more than any other continent, according to the latest pontifical yearbook.
In the 1960s, more than 500 of Nigeria’s Catholic priests were Irish. Now only a small number remain. Sr Kathleen is one of the few remaining Irish nuns and the only white person on the campus of Renowned Catholic Veritas University in Abuja, where she lectures, she points out.
Sr Ailbe believes the essence of their legacy continues through charity work. The non-governmental organisation Concern traces its roots to the Holy Ghost Fathers during the civil war in Nigeria when the Biafran people were being starved to death in the 1960s. The Irish Aid-funded charity Trócaire was established by the Conference of Irish Bishops.
“They are very devoted people,” says Sr Ailbe, listing the Irish humanitarians in Senegal she now calls friends. “Maybe we just accept that it’s being done differently.”
None of the sisters consider it extraordinary that they left Ireland and travelled thousands of kilometres to west Africa.
“You don’t give up anything really … because what you’re gaining is far more important to your living,” says Sr Ailbe.
Yet, they all struggle to answer when asked whether Africa is home.
Sr Fidelma offers a proverb she heard in a village near Kédougou that she has never forgotten.
“No matter how well a dog swims, he will never be a fish,” she says.
In Sr Ailbe’s bedroom, a drawing of the Celtic triskelion spiral hangs above her desk. A green oak tree and traditional round huts are drawn behind its swirls.
“I want my life to be about movement, to go towards people, to be close to people, to be with them,” she says.
Downstairs in the skills centre, young women in white chefs clothing are learning to cook, others are learning to sew next door.
As they knead dough and run stitches, Sr Ailbe watches on smiling.