Honora J. Woulfe (Sr. Íde) (1915–2015)

Honora Josephine Woulfe, later Sister Íde, was born on December 3, 1915, in Abbeyfeale, County Limerick, to Richard Barrett Woulfe and Catherine Colbert Woulfe. She had four siblings: Johanna Frances (b. 1914), Cornelius Colbert “Con” (b. 1917), Richard Michael (b. 1919), and Michael Joseph Colbert (b. 1922). All of the Woulfe children were priests or nuns.

Woulfe’s parents were active nationalists before and during the War of Independence (1919–1921). Catherine Woulfe’s younger brother, Con Colbert, participated in the Easter Rising of 1916 and was one of fifteen men executed at Kilmainham jail, in Dublin. Dick Woulfe ran a pharmacy on New Street in Abbeyfeale that became a hub of nationalist activity, and in 1920 it was damaged by the Black and Tans after the Irish Republican Army killed a local constable.

In an oral history conducted when she was in her nineties, Hanora Woulfe, then Sister Íde, recalled how the Black and Tans had attempted to arrest her father. “They were going to shoot him,” she said, “and I understand my mother screamed. She was upstairs. They’d locked my mother and one of the babies in […] They were trying to burn the house and my mother in it.” Dick Woulfe, however, was able to free her and escape out the back.

Now, at the back of our house, our garden opened into the river [Feale], and it seems he got out to the river and walked the river that night. And he walked, the story is told, in such a way that he got to the convent. And the nuns took him in and hid him behind the altar. And the soldiers came to the convent, and the reverend mother met them, but I think she must have told them they couldn’t go into the chapel, and they respected that. And he escaped, and so he was on the run from then on until the Truce.

Dick Woulfe sometimes hid at the nearby home of his sister Catherine Woulfe White. Sister Íde recalled that he had shaved his mustache and pretended to be “Uncle Jack,” so that even his young daughter, then about five years old, did not recognize him.

They told me he was Uncle Jack because there were girls in the school whose people were on the other side, and they would ask you, “Who was at your house last night?” And I was, I suppose, so innocent […] And when the Truce came, and I do remember this, they told me this was my daddy, and I went under the table and said, “No, no, no, it was Uncle Jack.” And I was crazy about Uncle Jack because, naturally, when he would come to the house he was everything to me. But he was definitely Uncle Jack. And it took them quite awhile to get it into my mind that this was my father.

Hanora Woulfe attended primary school in Abbeyfeale and then, in October 1934, matriculated at the Saint Louis Secondary School in Tirkeenan, County Monaghan, run by the Sisters of Saint Louis. Classes were conducted in Irish, and Woulfe recalled that she attended this particular school largely because her father was “very keen” on the language. After she died, the nun who delivered her eulogy recalled that Woulfe was “by her own account, a bit of a tomboy, often disregarding the rules and getting herself into trouble. Such unseemly behavior was evidently no obstacle to pursuing a vocation in religious life.” In August 1935 she began her novitiate, taking the name Sister Íde, after Saint Íte, of Killeedy, in West Limerick, who lived in the fifth century. Two years later, in August 1937, Sister Íde took her vows.

She taught in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire County, England, and then in Balla, County Mayo. In 1946, she was appointed assistant mistress of novices at the convent in Monaghan. He eulogist recalled that Sister Íde “gained a reputation for being tough, strict, forthright, a straight talker who shot from the hip but at the same time she was always fair and just.”

After four times being refused foreign missionary assignments, Sister Íde trained as a nurse in England and then as a midwife in Drogheda. She eventually was sent to Ghana, in West Africa, where she ran a hospital. She later worked as a nurse in Nigeria and trained for a year as a hospital chaplain in San Francisco, where her brother, Fr. Michael Woulfe, was then living.

She then became the Catholic chaplain at the City Hospital in Belfast, Northern Ireland, tending to the sick and dying until she herself died on July 4, 2015, at Musgrave Park Hospital, Stockman’s Lane, Belfast. She is buried in that city’s Hannaystown Cemetery.

Top of the page: Abbeyfeale, early twentieth century (Echoes of Abbeyfeale)

Selected Sources

Obituaries of Sr. Íde Woulfe, 2015.

Oral History Excerpts, part 1, part 2, Irish Life and Lore, 2015.

Registration of Birth, 1915.