Description
The Preacher and the Prelate: The Achill Mission Colony and the Battle for Souls in Famine Ireland
By Patrical Byrne
This is the extraordinary story of an audacious fight for souls on famine-ravaged Achill Island during the nineteenth century. Religious ferment swept across Ireland in the early part of the 1900s, and Protestant clergyman Edward Nangle’s Mission Colony was to lift the destitute people of Achill out of degradation and idolatry and into salvation. The fury of the island elements, the devastation of famine, Nangle’s own volatile temperament, and the unbearable suffering of his wife Eliza and her children all threatened the projects survival.
In the years of the Great Famine the ugly charge of ‘souperism’, offering food and material benefits in return for religious conversion, tainted the Mission’s work. John MacHale, powerful Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, spearheaded the Catholic Church’s fight back against Nangle’s colony, with the two clergymen unleashing fierce passions, with vitriol and polemic spewing out from pen and pulpit.
Did Edward Nangle and the Achill Mission Colony save hundreds from certain death, or did they shamefully exploit a vulnerable people to religious conversion? This dramatic tale of the Achill Mission Colony spectacularly exposes the fault-lines of religion, society and politics in nineteenth-century Ireland, and continues to excite controversy and division to this day.
Table of Contents
Part 1
- Shaking the Dry Bones
- The Most Destitute Spot in Ireland
- Bonfires in the West
- Scriptural Education
- Fractured
- Is it a Wafer or is it a God?
- Murder
- Public Scrutiny
- Tenth Year
- The Finger of God
Part 2:
- Quicksilver Illness
- Death is now loose
- Buyer of Souls
- Vicious and Rotten
- Feed the Children
- Workhouse War
- Three Women
- Battle of Stones
- Root and Branch Change
Part 3:
- Clearances
- Achill Transformed
- Implosion
- Weapons of his own Forging
About the Author:
Patricia Byrne is the author of The Veiled Woman of Achill: Island Outrage & a Playboy Drama (2012). She has contributed the Irish Times (Irishwoman’s Diary), New Hibernia Review, The Irish Story, RTE’s Sunday Miscellany and a range of other publications. Her work is listed among the ‘notable essays of the year’ in the 2017 edition of Best American Essays.
