Franciscan Brothers

transcribed at

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St. Francis being the leader of the Franciscan Brothers set his first foundation at Mount Bellew in 1818. In the beginning of the nineteenth century we can trace but one, a little convent at Dalkey dedicated to St. John.
In 1818 two Franciscan Brothers from St. John's came to Mount Bellew at the invitation of Mr. Christopher Dillon Bellew. There names were Brother Bonaventure Lee and Brother Michael Dillon and St. Francis himself as he looked down and saw them building their little huts on a dry turf bank, which had to serve them for shelter until their monastery was built years later. Indeed as one reads the story of the foundation at Mount Bellew, one is constantly

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transported into the atmosphere of the Fioretti.
 In 1823 Mr. Dillon laid the first stone of the modest new monastery and assigned as a means of support to the Brethren ten acres of fairly good land. Vocations were numerous and soon there were eighteen in the community. Some of them were skilled tradesmen, one a carpenter, another a cooper and others stone masons. These not only exercised their trades so as to make the house self-supporting, but they trained the boys of the neighbourhood in the useful crafts. Two of the community devoted themselves to working their little farm and producing the food they required. Other Brothers were engaged

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in the work of the schools, which soon had a great reputation, numbered more than two hundred pupils and attracted students not only from all parts of the West, but from Kilkenny and Clare. When the poor scholar was sufficiently advanced he went by arrangement to some other district and set up a little school of his own, and so the good work was beneficently extended.
On Sundays the Brothers went in twos to neighbouring churches: Mount Bellew, Moylough, Menlough, etc. and taught the Christian Doctrine before and after mass. They also read for the people, hungry for such instruction, books like Gallagher's  Irish Sermons.

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The times were very bad and a famine had ravaged the West in 1815 and another followed ten years later. The Brothers went far and wide questing for the relief of the destitute and a large part of their work consisted in visiting the sick and the needy throughout their district.