Sister Benedict’s Connemara farm

The late Maeve O’Beirne of Kilcarty House in Dunsany, later Sr Benedict of Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, features in a new book on the famous Galway convent and school.

Maeve – Mauveen as she was affectionately known around Meath when she farmed her father’s estate - was sent to junior school at Kylemore in 1938, to avoid the threat of war growing in Europe. Her father, a lecturer in criminal law in Cambridge, liked the relative freedom of the school.

"It was much more unconventional than other schools," she says in ‘The Benedictine Nuns and Kylemore Abbey: A History’ by Deirdre Raftery and Catherine Kilbride. After the professor’s death, and after reading law herself at Cambridge, she returned to Kylemore in 1957 to enter the monastery, eventually becoming what was essentially farm manager there.

Kylemore Abbey, depicted on many postcards and a popular tourism attraction in Connemara, is located on the banks of Kylemore Lough, and is home to a branch of Benedictine nuns that originally fled Belgium during World War I a century ago. Bombed out of Ypres, where the Slane poet Francis Ledwidge was killed, and where they had been based for hundreds of years, the nuns were rescued by the Royal Munster Fusiliers, before eventually arriving in Kylemore.

Maeve became Sr Benedict on 15th October 1962, and once professed, she was allowed to introduce several far seeing initiatives at the former home of the Galway MP and wealthy doctor Mitchell Henry, later owned by the Duke and Duchess of Manchester who were forced to sell it because of gambling debts. Benedict designed a five-year plan for the walled Victorian garden, to develop six acres; she taught horse-riding and she gave tuition to pupils who needed additional support. She also turned her hand to cookery. As the only community member who could drive, it was Dame Benedict who could undertake errands and drive the girls to any necessary appointments.

She brought her considerable farming knowledge to Kylemore, the authors tell us. She made the decision to get rid of the flock of sheep that the nuns had been grazing on the Diamond Mountain. The sheep were being regularly stolen, so Dame Benedict decided to end that venture. Instead, she got Friesian cows, which supplied the community with milk and butter, and a herd of Charolais cattle for beef. The changes that followed the Vatican Council meant that nuns could be given permission to attend meetings outside the enclosure. Dame Benedict was allowed to attend fisheries meetings, and was elected first president of the Northwest Connemara branch of the Irish Farmers’ Association.

As Mauveen O’Beirne, she was one of the founders of the National Farmers’ Association in Meath, elected treasurer at the formation meeting on 5th May 1955.

"The idea for the formation of a farmer’s association was actually conceived at an earlier meeting of Robinstown Macra na Feirme," Sr Benedict recalled later. "The then Agriculture Minister, James Dillon, was invited to address Robinstown Macra by Josie Maguire of Grangeboyne. He told the meeting that the farmers should come together and form their own organisation."

Sr Benedict died in Moycullen on 17th September 2018, at the age of 90.

Today, Kylemore is a busy educational facility, with a visitor centre, and a 10 year-plan that includes a new purpose-built monastery, repair and conservation works on the castle, the Victorian walled garden, the Gothic Church and the estate, to make the place viable as a tourist destination and a support to the economy of the region.