Remarkable life of the Offaly nun who brought back the missing statues

A REMARKABLE woman was buried after her funeral Mass in the graveyard beside St Carthage’s Church at Killina near Tullamore on Thursday of last week.

Sr Oliver Wrafter was 99 and had been chosen as Offaly Person of the Year in 2006 mainly due to her contribution to education at the Presentation school in Rahan where she was principal at one stage and taught for 44 years. She also started the Rahan Heritage Centre.

She died two days beforehand, on Tuesday of last week, at the Shalom nursing home in Kilcock, where she had been cared for over recent years.

A Presentation nun, her final resting place could hardly be more appropriate as she was credited with bringing secondary education to Rahan with the opening of the Killina Presentation Secondary School there, across from St Carthage’s church.

Even more remarkably she entered the convent at Rahan in 1940 where she stayed until its closure in 2019, living in the same room and sleeping in the same bed for over 75 years.

The convent had been open for 202 years, since 1817, and is now the Killina Presentation Resource Centre following an agreement reached between local people and the Presentation Sisters.

What people may not know about Sr Oliver is that her (lay) name was Ita, as she would always be known in the Wrafter family. Born on February 5, 1923, she had lost both her parents by the time she was 13. The family was living in Dublin then and she was just 2 when her mother Bridget died giving birth to Josephine, who also died a short time later.

An older sister Eileen [PM1] was born in 1919 and a brother Kevin in 1921. Both have died. Their father Joseph was a stonemason and at one time was head of the Stonemasons guild in Ireland. He died in 1936 aged 54 from a lung disease as a result of his trade.

It was then Ita and her siblings came to live in Tullamore with an elderly uncle and aunt.

Beforehand, in 1916, her father had been involved in what became known as 'the Tullamore Incident' where, it would be claimed later, the first shots of the Easter Rising were fired.

According to a statement by Peadar Barcken, a commanding officer in the Irish Volunteers, in the Bureau of Military History this 'Tullamore Incident' occurred at the Sinn Fein Hall on William Street in Tullamore (also now known as Colmcille Street).

Cumann na mBan members and five or six volunteers were planning a fundraiser to buy arms for the Volunteers when a hostile crowd gathered outside. Joe Wrafter and Peadar Bracken escorted the Cumann na mBan members home and returned to the hall where they were attacked by the crowd who then broke into the hall.

Peadar Bracken fired two shots over the crowds to disperse them. The RIC arrived then and insisted on searching the hall which the volunteers refused to allow, fearing they would lose the few arms and ammunition they had there. A fight broke out and shots were fired injuring an RIC sergeant.

Ita’s father Joe and three others were arrested that night, but the others escaped and two of them, including Peadar Bracken, took part in the 1916 Rising and survived. Joe Wrafter was held in Tullamore jail and transferred to Richmond barracks in Dublin in May 1916. He was subsequently court-martialled for attempted murder and imprisoned in Kilmainham jail.

The family don’t know what involvement he had in the War of Independence after that, but it is almost certain he would have been in Dublin for the Rising had it not been for the Tullamore incident.

Ita was always intensely proud of her father, recalls her first cousin (once removed) Ben Wrafter. Their grandfathers were brothers.

“My first memories of Sr Ita were her visits to our family home in Carrick and Shannon in what must have been the early 60s – I was no more than 5 or 6. At the time Sr Ita wore, along with the black habit, a very elaborate white head dress coming down onto her forehead which completely covered her hair and neck with only her face showing. To me it was totally exotic, her face was angelic, and I was sure she was really an angel,” he said.

“My next real involvement with Sr Ita was in College (UCG) in the early 70s. She was doing a BA and hDip. This came about as a result of the new Department (of Education) policy that schools had to have qualified teachers and Sr Ita was determined that the school would stay open, from what I understand, she had quite a fight to achieve that. I did not have a great deal of contact with her then – it wasn’t hip at 17 in College to have nuns as friends,” he said.

In more recent decades he became a regular visitor to Sr Oliver/Ita in Rahan where, he said, “my head used to swim with cousins, first and second cousins and when she went on about cousin’s 1st and 2nd removed, I was totally lost.”

They started to build a family tree and began visiting graveyards around Rahan and Tullamore, the cemetery in Mucklagh and the old cemetery in Rahan, checking out Wrafter graves. They also   started a Facebook page called 'the Wrafter Name' and got in touch with Wrafters in the US, Canada, Australia, and some European countries.

One of Ben’s favourite stories about Sr Oliver/Ita concerned three sculptures which ended up in the school at Rahan. Eventually. An American lady contacted her about sculptures of the O’Briens, who had been patrons of the convent at Rahan in the 1800s. The sculptures were by a reputable Italian sculptor but they had disappeared shortly after being set up in Rahan and were by then 'missing' for over 150 years.

“There was some discussion that these might be in the basements of the Pro Cathedral in Dublin so, true to fashion, Sr Oliver decided we should check this out and we headed for the Pro Cathedral – as ever, unannounced. We arrived in the Cathedral and went to see the caretaker or sacristan.”

It did not begin well. “He spent about 20 minutes politely, adamantly explaining to us that no one could visit the basement without the permission of the Archbishop which would have to be obtained in advance. Needless to say, after another 20 minutes of Sr Oliver/Ita being just as polite and just as adamant the door was unlocked, and we were ushered down into the basement. You know that man never really had a chance.”

The basement, Ben recalled as “incredible, with old burial vaults and all kinds of items stored and after some time, sure enough, we found the sculptures – the buckle on one of the sculptures had MOB on it so we knew these were the ones.”

Sr Ita/Oliver “looked up at me with a twinkle in her eye and with the greatest smile of satisfaction you could possibly imagine. Again, that was Sr Ita. Nothing would stop her and, as everyone knows now, the sculptures went back to Rahan school,” he said.

“For us in the family she was the very best of us,” he said. “She will be so sadly missed but I know that she is happy now in the place where she has wanted to be for some time past, with the God she devoted her life to and with her father Joe, sister Eileen, brother Kevin and Bridget the mother she never really knew and her sister Josephine who she never really knew either.”