Ireland’s Spiritual Empire: Territory and Landscape in Irish Catholic Missionary Discourse

Interest in the Irish diaspora and the influence of the Irish worldwide has often focused on the stories of those who left Ireland as victims of famine in the nineteenth century and the economic refugees of the twentieth century, but has also drawn attention to the Irish who were settlers in the colonies of the British Empire and those in the colonial service or otherwise allied with British expansion.¹ One readily identifiable group, neither unwilling economic migrants nor colonial officials, is that of the missionaries who travelled from Ireland with the goal of converting others to Christianity, primarily Catholicism. Historically, Ireland was known as the ‘Isle of Saints and Scholars’ due to the activities of Irish monks as missionaries throughout Europe, a missionary project that began soon after the dawn of Christianity.² But during the ninth century, what Neill describes as Ireland’s ‘great and beautiful Christian civilization’ was destroyed in Viking attacks,³ and, despite the international reputation of early Irish Christian missionaries such as Brendan and Columbanus, whose activities take on a legendary quality in popular history, the Irish had no distinctive profile of missionary activity from the close of the ninth century until the 1820s.⁴ After achieving Emancipation in 1829, the Irish Church grew in confidence and, while the first priority to be addressed was the religious needs of the diaspora, the presence of some French missionary organizations in Ireland was bringing an awareness of the issue of the conversion of pagans to public attention, a cause which was also being promoted by the papacy.