Genevieve Beale

The foundress of the Monaghan school was Genevieve Beale, a Catholic convert. She had been born Priscilla Beale to Protestant, possibly Quaker, parents in London in 1822. Her father was a property developer and speculator and it was the failure of his business that led Priscilla to take up a position with a family in Cork. While there, she became acquainted with Fr Mathew, the ‘apostle of temperance’, and Ellen Woodlock, who, though a Cork native, had been living at Juilly in France. When Priscilla converted, Mrs Woodlock encouraged her to enter the convent founded by the Abbé Bautain at Juilly. She was professed there in October 1848 and became Sr Genevieve. She trained as a teacher and became superior of the newly established St Louis convent in Paris. Priscilla Beale was not the only young woman to make the journey from Ireland to France. Ellen Woodlock’s recruitment drive had been a successful one and six Irish women entered the convent at Juilly at around the same time.In Ireland, meanwhile, the Catholic Church was seizing the opportunity presented by new legislation to expand. The 1858 act ‘to promote and regulate reformatory schools for juvenile offenders in Ireland’ gave state support to institutions run by voluntary organisations for ‘the better training of juvenile offenders’. Within a year six reformatories had opened, five of which were run by Catholic groups and for the exclusive incarceration of Catholic children. In late 1858 a small but influential group began to plan for such an institution in Monaghan. John Lentaigne, the inspector of prisons, Mrs Lloyd, the mother of Lady Rossmore and also a convert, Ellen Woodlock, whose family owned the woollen mills at Blarney, and the bishop of Clogher decided to open a reformatory in Monaghan. Ellen Woodlock wrote that ‘the bishop, Mrs Lloyd and Mr Lentaigne request a well-bred, well educated French sister’ for the task. The bishop wrote to the abbé in France to ask that a foundation of the St Louis order be established in Monaghan. Three sisters, Genevieve, Clare and Clement, arrived there on 6 January 1859 after an eventful journey from France, with very little money and an expectation that a house awaited them. There was no house and, after some nights spent in a hotel, they moved into a small, unfurnished house.