
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.
In her first essay, Olivia recalls her 12-year-old view of nuns: their long black clothes, their heads encased in stiff linen, their obsession with prayer and the Virgin Mary and purity - and making sure that girls would never see one another naked. Olivia is one of the last generation who went to a boarding school run by nuns and, like many other Irish families, she had an aunt who was a nun.
Presenter Olivia O'Leary
By BBC Radio 34.2
8282 ratings
Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.
In her first essay, Olivia recalls her 12-year-old view of nuns: their long black clothes, their heads encased in stiff linen, their obsession with prayer and the Virgin Mary and purity - and making sure that girls would never see one another naked. Olivia is one of the last generation who went to a boarding school run by nuns and, like many other Irish families, she had an aunt who was a nun.
Presenter Olivia O'Leary

7,669 Listeners

146 Listeners

1,049 Listeners

5,528 Listeners

1,795 Listeners

295 Listeners

1,753 Listeners

1,045 Listeners

1,921 Listeners

492 Listeners

584 Listeners

69 Listeners

413 Listeners

307 Listeners

759 Listeners

852 Listeners

128 Listeners

78 Listeners

244 Listeners

61 Listeners

52 Listeners

183 Listeners

4,160 Listeners

3,166 Listeners