Loss of Mount Melleray will be stunning blow

Now that the merger of Killala and Tuam dioceses into a new ecclesiastical unit edges ever closer and the curtains are being drawn on ‘the way we were’, I’ve been throwing my eye over the soon to be defunct dispensation that was once Killala diocese with, after an extended span of over more than nine centuries, its life now drawing to a close.

The following statistics give a sense of how history has a habit of suddenly packing its bags and heading off in a different direction. In the 914 years since the diocesan boundaries of Irish dioceses were first discussed in the Synod of Rathbrazil in the unforgettable year of 1111, in the case of Killala, I have been able to name an estimated 75 bishops, 1,086 priests, 796 religious sisters and 45 religious brothers who have served an area comprising North Mayo and West Sligo. It is not, even in the case of bishops, a complete listing as there are huge gaps that remain to be filled in – and may now never be.

As numbers of priests, religious sisters and religious brothers decline in future years, it will be easy to tabulate them and one figure that reflects the prevailing downward graph is that when the present mergers of dioceses are completed the number of bishops in Connacht will have declined in the last decade or so by 50% - from six to three!

The difficult truth is that within the geographical entity that was once the diocese of Killala, it looks as if that, relative to the past, there will be few vocations to count. A friend of mine, in acute denial, refuses to accept what he regards as my overly pessimistic assessment and points to the sudden blooming of religious vocations in unexpected categories like cloistered or enclosed religious orders. That may be true but, relatively, such figures flatter to deceive like when numbers categorised as ‘interested in the religious life’ as distinct from those who actually sign up for it are flaunted unconvincingly as evidence of ‘a corner being turned’.

Even within cloistered orders like the Trappists, mergers are in hand. Last January, according to a report in Conversations – the Dominican publication – Mount Melleray in Waterford has closed "for at least a year and a half" in order to assess a possible Trappist merging with the monks of Roscrea and Mellifont. After that time the monks will vote "as to where the future of this new community will be".

It seems a sensible and inevitable course to form a stronger community of existing novices, though Mount Melleray’s closure – the oldest living monastery in Ireland and the first founded since Catholic Emancipation in 1829 – is a stunning loss. It’s not just a place of exceptional natural beauty with views over the Blackwater valley and the Knockmealdown mountains but – to use that over-used term – it holds an ‘iconic’ status in terms of a religious community, heirs to the Celtic monasticism of the early Middle Ages that refused to die.

In 1817, Mellarey Abbey was founded in Brittany by the Trappists – a seventeenth-century reform of the Cistercians – as an eclectic mix of Irish, English and French monks set up their monastic stall. However, just 13 years later, the 1830 Revolution in France, responding to growing liberal sentiments in Europe, led to the expulsion of foreign monks from France. This led in turn to a decision by the Brittany Trappists to move to Ireland (where Catholics had recently gained new liberties with Catholic Emancipation) and to source a suitable site for a new Mellarey Abbey.

The prior, Vincent Ryan and his companion, Brother Malachy, travelled to Ireland and, an important port of call was a visit in Dublin to Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator of Catholic Ireland. O’Connell graciously invited Ryan to dinner and there - providentially or otherwise - was Dean John Patrick Lyons, PP , of Kilmore Erris parish, on his way to England to source support for his parishioners during one of the periodic famines that afflicted the Mullet at that time. 

O’Connell introduced the two Trappists to Lyons and explained their mission to Ireland. Lyons could scarcely believe his ears. Here were Trappists/Cistercians, acknowledged pioneers of modern systems of agriculture, and here was Lyons, from the Mullet, where he was experimenting with a Model Farm in order to improve the lives of his hungry parishioners.

As Ryan’s biographer, Killian Walsh described it, Lyons – "as if angels and manna had dropped about him from heaven" – in surprise and joy rose to his feet and immediately offered "800 acres of good reclaimable land" to the Trappists. Some weeks later, Lyons met Ryan in Dublin and they set off on "a journey to the promised land by the shores of Blacksod Bay". On their way, they called to Ballina where two startled bishops – Peter Waldron and his coadjutor, John MacHale – were introduced by Lyons to Ryan and to the incredible prospect of a proposed monastic foundation in Kilmore Erris.

Unfortunately, when Ryan surveyed the Mullet with Lyons and saw "the dreary bog, dotted with miserable hovels of the poor, scarcely fit to house animals" and "with soil that was little more than a source of fuel", he knew that, despite Lyons’ buoyant optimism, the Mullet was a bad fit for the new Mount Mellarey.

Lyons’ dream of a monastic foundation in the Mullet had come to nothing and, as he surveyed the bleak landscape with Dom Vincent Ryan on a little boat pulling out of Blacksod Bay, he must have pondered how, in Kevin Hegarty’s memorable comment, "even the Cistercian capacity for austerity was exhausted by the barren landscape of Shanahee".

In the event, a new Mount Mellarey didn’t rise from the limited circumstances of life in the Mullet, and Dom Eugene Ryan, through the good offices of a philanthropic Protestant landlord, Sir Richard Keane, was gifted with a site on the then untamed wilderness of the Knockmealdowns.

The rest, as they say, is history.