INTERVIEW: Sr Stanislaus Kennedy put her wild days behind her when she joined a convent, and has spent her life fighting for the poor, with an attitude that has brought her into conflict with the government, the church, and her own order.
I WAS A WILD young one once.” Campaigner for the homeless and social visionary Sr Stanislaus Kennedy offers this surprising revelation while discussing the period more than 50 years ago when she decided to become a nun. We are sitting in her office in The Sanctuary, a meditation centre she created in Dublin to serve the spiritual needs of people including those she helped through her work with Focus Ireland, the homeless agency she founded in the 1980s.
Her memoir The Road Home is about to be published and on the shelves of this bright, cosy space are books by Buddhist monks and Irish poets. She is wearing a navy suit with a crucifix on a chain at her throat and a gold leaf brooch on one lapel. The muted sound of what might be pan-pipes can be heard through a speaker. A twice-a-day meditator, she says the music reminds her to be “still” and “mindful”. As she sits at her desk, pouring herself a glass of water, she is a picture of serenity.
But hang on a second. Back when her name was Treasa Kennedy and she was one of Tadhg Mhuillean’s daughters enjoying an idyllic childhood on a farm near Lispole in Co Kerry – back then she was wild? “Well, when people around Dingle heard that one of Tadhg Mhuillean’s daughters was going into the convent they never would have picked me out as the one. Nuns used to come to our school looking for vocations but they asked other girls. I wasn’t predictable. I was into the dances and that side of life but going away to be a nun was all about the greater good. It was the ‘other’ that drew me more.”
The ‘other’ to which she refers is her lifelong passion for serving the poor. She was a young teenager when she first began to notice “the difference between those who owned something and those who didn’t, between those who could afford to send their children to second-level school and those who couldn’t.” She remembers expressing these concerns to her mother, a woman who was determined that her daughters were educated. Her mother replied: “That’s the way life is and if you study you’ll get your exams and that won’t be your life.”
If her mother didn’t fully understand where she was coming from, in the end Treasa Kennedy figured it out. “I knew I could become a nurse or teacher like my sisters but then I wouldn’t have had direct contact with the people I wanted to help. There was no social work path or chance to study social sciences at the time. I did have faith but I was lured into the convent, by God I think now, because I really wanted to work with the poor and I was deeply attracted to the work of the Sisters of Charity . . . I entered for one reason and stayed for another. I stayed because I began to realise in a much bigger way what it meant to be religious and that the whole spiritual and prayer life was right for me.”
She did waver slightly at the beginning. “The head of the order told me there was three times during the year when I could come and one of them was July 16th. I said, ‘I can’t because there’s a carnival on that day at home.’ In the end I did go on that date. It’s funny because on the day I entered the convent at Milltown in Dublin there was a carnival going on there too; I could hear all the songs I loved through the windows. I knew I was making a decision that meant I had to sacrifice all that and there were lonely days at the beginning, but I was much more drawn to the ‘other’.”
Her work in service of the poor began in earnest in Kilkenny in the mid-1960s when she was called on to assist bishop Peter Birch, who was setting up a pioneering community services project in the area. He became her friend and mentor, shaping her views on the marginalised in society and on how best to include and empower them. She believed, as did Birch, that the Catholic church needed to “identify more with the poor” in the spirit of the Sisters of Charity founder Sr Mary Aikenhead. This proved controversial. “At one early stage I was silenced by the order for speaking out about poverty and the church but I always stuck my head up again. I think it was that I really believed that services weren’t enough; you had to have advocacy as well, that’s what drove me.”
THERE IS A perception abroad that Sr Stan, or simply Stan as she is known by many, is a slightly stern character. Over the course of a couple of hours she laughs loudly and often, rendering her about as forbidding as a giggling Buddha statue. She laughs most when recalling encounters with former taoiseach Charles Haughey. They met when she was appointed chair of an EU-funded pilot scheme for Combat Poverty agencies in the 1970s, which initiated a radical approach to working with the poor, setting up rural co-operatives and supporting projects for Travellers, the disabled and women. Haughey, then minister for health, and Stan didn’t exactly hit it off.
“He saw me by myself first. He talked about the fact that really what we were doing was rubbish and that we should concentrate on doing meals on wheels and things like that. I think he thought that by talking to me in that way I would just agree. So I listened. When he was finished I said, ‘With respect I don’t agree with you at all.’ ”
Stan suggested he meet the rest of the committee. “He lambasted us all, he really did,” she says laughing. “He insisted what we were doing would go nowhere and that it was Marxist and he said: ‘As for you Sr Stanislaus, you are the most intransigent woman I’ve ever met.’ ”
When EU funding for the pilot scheme came to an end, the government declined to support the agency and the work stopped. The Combat Poverty Agency was resurrected again in the 1980s and operated for 15 “tremendous” years until, at the height of the boom, the plug was pulled again, by another Fianna Fáil government, this time under Bertie Ahern. This decision, says Stan, was “shortsighted”.
When bishop Birch died in the early 1980s, Stan was moved from Kilkenny to Dublin, where she began studying homelessness and, in 1985, she set up Focus Point, now Focus Ireland.
She gathered a team of committed experts around her and developed, among other initiatives, the use of transitional housing, an innovative idea at the time. The first such project was a conversion of the Stanhope Street convent in Grangegorman where The Sanctuary is based. There are now dozens of Focus Ireland projects around the country although her frustration with political policy on homelessness is never far from the surface especially now that hostels are “bursting at the seams with no social housing being provided”.
The last government’s bid to end homelessness by 2010 was a failure but it is an achievable goal, says Stan. “It just takes political will,” she says. “You need a solid plan to provide housing, whether they get it from Nama or however but they must provide long-term housing so people can move on.”
“The number of unemployed is continuing to soar. And what do we get? What we get is cuts and huge increases in prices in basic services such as electricity and gas. This is the worst possible combination for people at the bottom. And a recipe for gross inequality, and desperate poverty, causing huge suffering and damage.”
Her lifelong mantra is the call for a more equal society “where the people who have more, pay more. It’s never the right time to divide the cake so we may as well divide it now. We certainly didn’t do it when we were rich and we could have; that is a terrible scandal.”
Another scandal in Irish society has caused her deep pain. She writes in her book that she has yet to fully recover from the implication in the States of Fear programme that she knew about the physical and sexual abuse meted out to some boys in St Joseph’s industrial school in Kilkenny.
The school was located on the grounds of the convent where she lived and was run under the auspices of the Sisters of Charity.
The Ryan Report subsequently included two claims that she had been told about the physical abuse of children at St Joseph’s, claims she has always refuted.
“I never had an inkling or came across anything about it although I suppose living on the grounds of the school it was difficult for people to believe that I did not know.”
How did she cope with the accusations?
“I think first of all I was shocked that people would think I had known anything about it . . . when you are accused in the wrong it really does affect you but I had to contrast that with the hurt the children went through, which was terrible. The two came together within in me, my hurt and the hurt of those boys who came in and trusted the system. For all of us it’s a deep wound; the shame and hurt of it, it’s appalling.”
WHETHER YOU CALL it intransigence or tenacity, Sr Stan has a track record of surmounting obstacles to turn good ideas into successful projects. Other initiatives she dreamed up and worked to make manifest include the Immigrant Council of Ireland and Young Social Innovators. Her religious order has been a constant support, financially and otherwise, but she has remained something of a maverick within the Catholic church.
While she holds with the core values of her religion of “care and justice and love” she does not agree with other aspects, such as the ban on contraception. She writes in her book of the distrust of laity that permeates the church’s thinking, which she says is “at the root of the appalling lack of respect for the civil law that the church has shown in the matter of the non-reporting of the sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy”.
She also believes celibacy should be optional. “I think it is a life that is for some and not for others.” What does she think the pope would say about her views? “Oh I don’t know what he’d say,” she laughs while rolling her eyes to heaven. She believes the material “trappings” of the church are unnecessary. “It’s part of the institution that has built up but I don’t agree with it at all. I think life should be simple and authentic and transparent and should speak of love and justice and the rest could go.”
Does she make her views on this known to those higher up? “I don’t put energy towards knocking down the system. You could waste a lot of energy there. I would rather direct my energy towards people and towards community . . . I believe the church will die in one way and rise again in another way. Good things are happening, seeds are being sown, good seeds that will sprout again.”
She takes pleasure in gardening and finds her daily walks in the fresh air “renewing”. Like the women you see pounding the streets of the capital in business suits on their way to work, the 72-year-old campaigning nun carries her good shoes in a bag, puts on her runners and walks everywhere.
She still works one or two days a week in the Focus Ireland café in Temple Bar, where meals and support are provided for homeless people. There are regular meetings with the Immigrant Council of Ireland and Young Social Innovators and then her work at The Sanctuary where she teaches meditation one night a week. At the start of this year she went on an eight-day silent retreat at an ashram in India. “A wonderful experience,” says the woman who writes in her book about growing old gratefully.
Stan’s next big idea is to set up a mindfulness programme in schools across the country. “I want to help young people to be still and find stillness in their lives . . . if we can get this programme to young people it will really affect how they live their lives in critical ways.”
She says she wants young people to know they have a choice about how they respond to life at any given moment.
“I am really excited about it. This is a development I didn’t think would ever happen,” says the once wild woman who knows far better than most exactly how to make things happen.
The Road Home: My Journey by Sr Stan is published by Transworld Ireland
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