Courtney McGrail
Fr Paddy Moran tells Rachel Beard about how he came to work in prisons in Ethiopia
Rachel Beard
“Home is an interesting thing,” Fr Paddy Moran says as he reminisces on the 11 years of his life spent in Ethiopia. “It’s a bit like shifting sands. Where is home? If you make one place your home then it almost seems counterintuitive to talk about coming home to Ireland, because Ireland is more familiar than home.”
Fr Paddy grew up in an Irish Catholic family, but having spent so much of his life working in Ethiopia, it doesn’t quite feel right to say he’s “coming home” to Ireland.
“In Ethiopia, I had established a way of being and working and in Ireland,” he says. “You have to relearn all of these things because the things I would’ve taken for granted in Ethiopia, it’s just a different way of working in Ireland.”
Fr Paddy had an interest in joining the Church since he was 15 and two priests visited his school to give a vocations talk.
“That was the introduction because I followed a correspondence with them and they had a programme,” he says. “I did three of them, and after the last one I formally applied and was accepted. So I would say I had a sense of the vocation since I was 16.”
When he became a priest, Fr Paddy joined the Spiritans in Ireland. However, he never felt a calling to be a parish priest.
Mixture
“What I did was really a mixture,” Fr Paddy says. “One was a sense of the missionary vocation, a sense of the wonder of adventure, and also to be in a different place in space. That is a really compelling thing, and the congregation of Spiritans in Ireland, we were always meeting men who had worked in Asia or Africa, so we were always hearing mission stories and for me, it was a chance to be a part of that story.”
When he first started working in Ethiopia, Fr Paddy and his team struggled to connect with the locals.
“Language is the first problem,” he says. “Nelson Mandela said if you speak a language we both understand you speak to my head, but if you speak my language you speak to my heart, so it was big to me to speak the national language to be able to speak, to preach, to listen.”
After learning the national language in Ethiopia, Fr Paddy has had a much easier time connecting with the locals and building a sense of community.
About six years ago, Fr Paddy was approached to start working in a prison in Ethiopia where he noticed there was a lot of work to be done.
“But then, within the prison, we could see there was huge needs,” he says. “A very good spirit but a very limited infrastructure, and that led to one project then another and at this stage, we’ve done 20 projects.”
When Fr Paddy returns to Ethiopia, he’ll start working on art projects with the prisoners.
“We’re doing pottery and painting, and we’ve done a lot of infrastructure, more classrooms,” he says. “We built a centre for people who were recovering from illness. We’ve also built five classrooms, a lab for the school, a computer room, a shelter for the weavers, and we built the toilet and shower block for the female prisoners and children and provided every woman and child with a bed, a mattress, and a mosquito net.”
Fr Paddy went to World Youth Day for the last weekend in July, but he only spent a few days back in Ireland before heading back to Ethiopia on August 4.
“This is the first time that I’m going with a criminologist. Prof. Ian O’Donnell is the professor of criminology at UCD,” he says. “I’ve been working in prisons for six years, but I’ve never really studied it, and he was also the chairman of the penal reform mission in Ireland. The idea is to go with him for a week and to look at how does the prison operate and what could we do differently, how can we add value give ourselves an opportunity to be more relevant.”
After 11 years of working in the country, Fr Paddy feels a “duty of care to Ethiopia”.
“If we were to talk to 10 people here and say I worked in Ethiopia, tell me your first impression,” he says. “I suspect eight would say famine, one would say coffee, one would say long distance running. But in actual fact Ethiopia is a vibrant society. It’s a really well-developed and amazing place.”
Despite the work he’s accomplished in Ethiopia, Fr Paddy will return to Ireland in September to his job as the Vocations Director for the Spiritans in Ireland to help to “create a culture of vocations” in his home country.
“I don’t necessarily believe that it’s about inviting people to the Spiritans,” he says. “If they want to come and join us, that’s fantastic, but how is it that we as missionaries can develop a sense of vocation in schools, in parishes, and my role and responsibility is how can I tell the story of mission now that I’m back in Ireland.”
Although he’s mainly based in Ireland, Fr Paddy is “excited” to return to Ethiopia. “I feel desperately homesick, delighted to go back,” he says. “It’s my home.”