This Europe: Ireland's islanders run out of local priests

The last resident priest on Clare Island bade a sad farewell to his parishioners at the weekend.

The island, off the coast of Co Mayo in the west of Ireland and home to just 160 people, is the latest to feel the cold winds of clerical shortages.

In the same group of islands, Inishbofin has had no resident priest since last summer. And weekend Masses have been discontinued at three churches on Achill Island.

Fr Ned Crosby, a former missionary in Peru, will not be replaced. The religious needs of the islands will be served by priests from Westport on the mainland.

However, that assurance did not impress one islander, Ann Flynn. "Where will it all end?" she wondered. "What about wintertime when the seas are rough? Will the priests always be able to travel? What if somebody gets sick in the night and needs to be anointed?"

Fr Crosby had become a unifying force, lamented the island's community nurse, Margaret O'Grady. "He really made this place seem like a community," she said.

Oliver O'Malley said the loss of a resident priest to an island was much more significant than if it happened in a parish on the mainland.

"If I was in any other part of Ireland, I could drive 15 or 20 miles to Mass," Mr O'Malley explained. "Islanders don't have that option."

Charles O'Malley, a boatman, has been bringing priests to Clare Island and Inishturk for half a century. "There has been a priest on Clare Island for more than 100 years," he said.

Mary McCabe, a primary school teacher on the island, said: "It's the end of an era. It's the first time in living memory there was no resident priest on Clare Island."

Ms McCabe credited Fr Crosby with a revival in attending Mass. Young people who had stopped going to church were coming back, she said.

Some islanders, Padraig O'Malley, chairman of the parish council among them, thought that if Catholic priests were allowed to marry, the clerical shortages might be reversed.

"Something has to be done," said the island manager, Donal O'Shea. "The Archdiocese of Tuam used to send missionaries all over the world. Now there is a shortage."