Who We Are

Following Mary’s training at the Bar Convent in York, the Congregation of the Religious Sisters of Charity was founded and the first convent opened in North William Street, Dublin in 1815.

In 1821 the Governor of Kilmainham Gaol asked for sisters to visit two young women who had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The Governor was so impressed by the sister's influence on these women that he asked that they would continue to be involved in prison visitation. To this day, prison visitation is an important ministry for the Congregation.

At the request of the Archbishop of Dublin, the Sisters of Charity opened their first school in 1830 in Gardiner Street, Dublin.

In 1832 there was an outbreak of Asiatic cholera in Ireland. A temporary hospital was set up in Grangegorman but it was badly managed and under-staffed. The Archbishop of Dublin asked Mary Aikenhead to send some of her sisters to Grangegorman to help. The death rate was high, but the sisters remained at their posts bringing solace to the dying and gentle nursing to the convalescents. Only one sister contracted the disease, but none died.

In 1834 St. Vincent’s Hospital opened in a house on St. Stephen’s Green. It was the first hospital staffed by nuns in the English-speaking world.

In 1840 Mary Aikenhead answered a call for help from the Jesuits in Preston, Lancashire which led to the opening of the Congregation’s first convent in England.

The Children's Hospital was founded in 1872 by a group of charitable people in a house at 9 Upper Buckingham Street, Dublin. In 1876, the Governing Committee invited the Religious Sisters of Charity to take over the complete running of the hospital.

Our Lady’s Hospice, Harold’s Cross was opened in 1879. Newspaper reports at the time hailed the opening of the Hospice as ‘a unique charity’ and as one ‘previously unknown in these islands, or indeed in the neighbouring continent’.

In 1892 Providence Woollen Mills was established under the guidance of Sr. Mary Arsenius Morrogh Bernard as a way of improving the social and economic conditions of the people of Foxford, Co. Mayo.