Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: The Essay
Episode: A Dying Breed
Description: Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.Olivia's final essay is about the end of the tradition of religious orders. Ireland has fallen out of love with the Catholic Church. Hardly a month goes by without more revelations of harsh treatment of girls in institutions run...