John Patrick Lyons

“John Patrick Lyons, a clerical social reformer, was passionate that Christian witness had to be actualised in active concern for the alleviation of poverty and the removal of its structural causes”

Second Reading
Fr Kevin Hegarty

Fernando Lugo Mendez has recently been elected as President of Paraguay. He has broken the stranglehold of the Colorado party which, through a mixture of terror and corruption, oppressed the people for 61 years.
He has a somewhat unusual background for a politician. He is a Catholic bishop who sought leave of absence from his post to fight the election.
Mendez is a committed believer in liberation theology, a form of theological reflection which, since the 1970s, has tried to confront the structural poverty that bedevils South America. Liberation theology finds little favour in the Vatican as it is influenced by the Marxist critique of the economic system. Many South American Catholics cling to the hope it offers them.
Ireland lay under the poison cloud of poverty in the 19th century, much like Paraguay today. Irish priests and nuns played a major role in alleviating the distress of their communities, though none offered themselves for election. Some priests were active in the background, supporting Nationalist and Tenant League candidates.
John Patrick Lyons was one of the most active clerical social reformers in Mayo. He was born in the late years of the 18th century in the parish of Bekan. He belonged to a comfortable farming family which afforded him the opportunity of a classical education.
He was a man of literary and cultural interests. His letters reveal him to be an excellent writer of English prose. His vast library was a testament to his deep interest in the disciplines of theology, literature and history.
He accumulated a collection of rare Irish manuscripts. He was a fund of knowledge on Irish art and antiquities. John O’Donovan, who, in the 1830s, led the Ordnance Survey, the team that plotted the first comprehensive mapping of Ireland, consulted the ‘celebrated’ Dr Lyons on antiquarian remains in the baronies of Erris and Tyrawley.
Lyons visited Rome in 1842 where he examined Roman archives in search of Irish manuscripts. In the College of St Isidore he discovered 25 volumes. He made accurate tracings of the chief subjects in the collection which he posted in a book and placed in the library of the Royal Irish Academy, where they remain.
He studied for the priesthood for the diocese of Killala and was ordained in 1821. After four years of service in Ballina, his bishop, Dr Waldron, appointed him to the parish of Kilmore-Erris where he remained until his death in 1845.
In the early years of the 19th century, the barony of Erris, approximating in size to the county of Dublin, was relatively undiscovered. WH Maxwell, in his book ‘Wild Sports of the West’, wrote that, on leaving Newport, he looked around and ‘took a silent but mournful farewell of Christendom’. Until the 1820s, when the first major road was constructed, Erris was inaccessible from November to May.
Given its barren landscape, its distance from the centres of commerce, its high population and out-dated agricultural methods, it is not surprising that Erris was one of the most impoverished regions in pre-famine Ireland. Over half of his parishioners lived in a constant tension between survival and destitution. The witnesses from the parish to the Poor Law Inquiry in the 1830s convey a melancholic unanimity about the depth of its poverty.
In a telling detail, Lyons reported that over one third of his parishioners ‘could scarcely make their appearance in the congregation on a Sunday’. He told the Poor Law Inquiry: “When I hold a station for Mass and confessions, persons commonly request of me to let them go early as they must lend their clothes to their neighbours so that they may come in their turns.”
Lyons quickly set about the religious reform of his new parish. He organised the building of a church at Binghamstown. He established a Sunday school there for catechetical instruction. He streamlined the system of parish collections which, up to then, had been arbitrary and open to abuse! He was well aware that only one third of the community were able to pay for the up-keep of the parish and its clergy.
He did not confine himself to religious matters. He was passionate that Christian witness had to be actualised in active concern for the alleviation of poverty and the removal of its structural causes. He wanted to remove the tyranny of poverty from the shoulders of his people.
He believed that the provision of education was one of the keys to social progress. He welcomed the establishment of the National Education system in 1831 as it enabled him to set up a phalanx of six schools throughout the parish. Here he differed with many fellow clerics, most notably Archbishop MacHale of Tuam, who were still of the view that Irish Catholics should burn everything from the English administration, except its coal.
His community suffered severe famines in 1831 and 1835. Lyons travelled to England to collect money for the alleviation of their distress. He was aware that such measures met only an immediate need. They assuaged, but did not solve, the central economic problem.
This perception led him to become involved in agricultural reform. The landlords of the parish were uninterested in reform but this did not deter him. He believed that agricultural practices were out-dated and a significant contributor to its economic vulnerability.
He rented a large tract of land and tried to persuade the Cistercian Order, noted for its devotion to spiritual austerity and practical agriculture, to establish a model farm there. Here people might be trained in progressive agriculture.
The Cistercians rejected his overtures. Even their prodigious capacity for austerity was exhausted by the then desolate landscape of Kilmore-Erris. Undaunted, he set about the task himself with the help of a young man whom he had trained at an agricultural college in Dublin. Until the calamity of the Great Famine in 1845 the farm flourished and was a beacon of progress to his community.
Professor Joe Lee, in his book ‘The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848-1918’, claims that Irish priests and nuns played a significant role in the modernisation of Irish society. John Patrick Lyons was one of them. He deserves to be remembered.