Qualla: Knights of Saint Columbanus

Knights of Saint Columbanus: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MMD640, CC BY-SA 4.0. Eamon de Valera, the most powerful Catholic in twentieth-century Ireland, told the Fianna Fail Ard-Fheis in 1943 that maintaining "an organization for the protection of Catholic interests" in a country where ninety-three percent of the population were already Catholics was "absurd." He was referring, without quite naming it, to the Knights of Saint Columbanus - the fraternal order founded in Belfast in 1915 by a parish priest who had watched Catholics hanged in effigy from buildings in his neighbourhood. De Valera tried, on more than one occasion, to get his ministerial colleagues to resign their membership. They did not always listen.

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Knights of Saint Columbanus: Belfast, 1915

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MMD640, CC BY-SA 4.0. Canon James Kearney O'Neill of Ballycastle, County Antrim, was parish priest of the Sacred Heart in industrialised Belfast in the early years of the twentieth century. The city was rough on Catholics. Local government in Belfast at the time was entirely Protestant and Unionist; e...

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Knights of Saint Columbanus: Ely Place

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarkusMark, CC BY-SA 3.0. From its Georgian clubhouse at Ely Place in Dublin, the Order spread out into Irish public life with what one academic study, Church, State and Social Science in Ireland, called "the Irish organisation most durably associated with combating Catholic economic subordination." The f...

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Knights of Saint Columbanus: The Cold War on Dawson Street

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MMD640, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1948, with a Communist victory looking possible in the Italian election, Pope Pius XII warned of a stark choice between Christianity and "atheistic communism." Archbishop McQuaid took the message seriously. Within twenty-four hours of asking, he received a cheque for five thou...

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Knights of Saint Columbanus: The Hume Exception

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MMD640, CC BY-SA 4.0. Not all of the Order's history runs through McQuaid's office. In May 1960 at a Knights of Saint Columbanus branch meeting in Derry, a young John Hume - later founder of the SDLP and Nobel Peace laureate - proposed the founding of Derry Credit Union, and the Order backed him. Cred...

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Knights of Saint Columbanus: Modern Quietude

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MMD640, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the 1990s the Order's influence had visibly contracted. The waves of clerical sexual abuse revelations and the broader collapse of clerical authority in Irish public life had weakened the institutional Catholic Church to an extent few would have predicted in McQuaid's heyday. ...

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