by Michael Connolly

Ned Prendergast’s comprehensive history of the Marist Brothers in Ireland is the product of a decade dedicated to researching, articulating, and retelling the story of the renowned religious teaching Institute in that part of the world, and beyond. Published in 2021, in just over eight-hundred pages, for the first time Prendergast documents the myriad contributions of individual male religious to Catholic life in Ireland - as well as further afield - since the first Marist school opened in Sligo in 1862. The result is a ‘living history’ and significant record of the Marist Brothers, against the backdrop of developments in wider Catholicism in Ireland during the last one hundred and sixty years.(1)

Dr Michael Connolly works in the Faculty of Health Science and Sport at the University of Stirling where he teaches a range of subjects including the history of sport, aspects of sport management and qualitative research methods.