Frank Hugh O'Donnell - Author

Author

In his later years O'Donnell considered that both the British administration and the Roman Catholic church in Ireland was working against the best interests of the Irish people. His Paraguay on Shannon (1908) is an amusing but serious critique of the power of the Catholic Church in local politics and education, particularly in its involvement with the Congested Districts Board that was sponsored unquestioningly by the British government. He felt that much of Irish poverty and a lack of self-help and self-respect was due to unsanitary church-run National Schools, bad education and over-spending on new churches. Yet, unlike most anti-clerical critics, he was not a socialist.

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