Born: June 19th, 1939
Died: November 3rd, 2025
Sr Stanislaus “Stan” Kennedy was, according to Charles Haughey, the most intransigent woman he had ever met. Admittedly, he said that before he encountered Margaret Thatcher.
Then, in the late 1970s, Sr Stan was chair of an EU-funded National Committee on Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty in Ireland. It had taken a radical approach, setting up rural co-operatives while supporting projects for Travellers, the disabled and women.
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Some of its members had a meeting with Haughey, then minister for health. He was not impressed and described what they were doing as “rubbish” and that we should “concentrate on doing meals on wheels and things like that”. Sr Stan interrupted him, “with respect, I don’t agree with you at all”.
He then “lambasted us all. He insisted what we were doing would go nowhere and that it was Marxist”, and added “as for you Sr Stanislaus, you are the most intransigent woman I’ve ever met”. She was proud of that.
Haughey was not alone. In 2003, on being presented with yet another honorary doctorate, she was described as “a woman known for her directness, persistence and a cultivated inability to comprehend the answer ‘no’”.
She tended to accept those views herself. In later life she agreed she could be difficult and stubborn because working for the poor “involves difficult and humiliating tasks such as going from door to door, looking for funds”.
Her first experience of real poverty was working in Dublin’s Ringsend during the late 1950s while still a novice. It left a deep impression. Soon, she also realised “services weren’t enough; you had to have advocacy as well, that’s what drove me”.
She had a deep impulse to help people in distress or despair whether through poverty or for spiritual reasons. Her advocacy also spurred her to write thousands of articles, give as many talks and to write or edit at least 27 books.
Treasa Kennedy was the fourth in a family of five who lived on a small farm at Lispole near Dingle in Kerry. Her mother “from the fíor Gaeltacht – where Peig Sayers came from; my father came from the breac area. Both spoke beautiful Irish”. Locally, that meant being seen as “kind of inferior”, she said. There was “little Irish spoken in Dingle then and none spoken in the shops”. Speaking Irish was “proof that you were uneducated”.
She was “a wild young one, into the dances and that side of life”, she said in an interview in 2011. So, “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”.
One of her sisters told her about the Irish Sisters of Charity, “a friend of hers was joining the order. They were the people who worked with the poor and the homeless. That was it. I joined the nuns”.
In 1958 she entered the novitiate at Milltown in Dublin with 100 others and was given the name Stanislaus.
In the mid-1960s her work began in earnest in Kilkenny, where she was sent to assist the innovative bishop of Ossory, Peter Birch, then setting up a pioneering community services project. He became her mentor, shaping her views on the marginalised. She believed, as did Birch, that the Catholic Church needed to “identify more with the poor”. This proved controversial.
“I wrote a paper saying the church had resources and it wasn’t using them for the poor. Well, all hell broke loose because it was picked up by the media. People were furious, bishops were furious, I got a letter from Rome, in the end of it I was silenced. But then I rose up again and started speaking out again.”
That she did. Later it included challenging mandatory celibacy for priests, supporting equality for women in the church and calling for a Yes vote in the 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage.
She founded and directed Kilkenny Social Services and went on to cofound the School of Social Education in Kilkenny, providing the first professional courses for residential childcare workers in Ireland.
When Bishop Birch died suddenly in 1981, she moved to Dublin and studied for a degree in social science at UCD, then went on to take a master’s at the University of Manchester.
In 1985 the European Commission appointed her co-ordinator of the European rural poverty projects within the EU. In Dublin, also that year, she founded the body with which she is most publicly identified, Focus Ireland, the biggest voluntary housing organisation in the State.
In 1998 she founded the Sanctuary, a holistic spirituality centre in Dublin, and in 2001 established both the Immigrant Council of Ireland, to promote the rights of immigrants, and Social Innovations Ireland Ltd, to help young people respond to the needs of 21st-century Ireland.
In 2009 she was deeply wounded by a finding in the Ryan report that included two claims that she had been told, while at the institution, about the physical abuse of children at St Joseph’s in Kilkenny, claims she rejected.
“I never had an inkling or came across anything about it,” she said. “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,” she said.
In 2017 she was very upset by abuse directed at the Sisters of Charity over proposals to locate the National Maternity Hospital at St Vincent’s hospital in Dublin. “I might be better known in the media, but I couldn’t hold a candle to these colleagues in terms of lifelong dedication,” she said then.
In 2017 she became ill but it was 2020 before she could speak of the cancer, admitting she couldn’t bring herself to say the word at first. “I never thought I was going to die, I didn’t think about that at all. I drew on my faith ... that helped me.”
As described in 2003 when being presented with an honorary doctorate at Maynooth University, one of at least 18 awards she was given, Sr Stanislaus Kennedy was “a woman of immense reputation; a servant of the underprivileged people of modern Ireland”.
