From Born of Ireland Fb page: In eighteenth century Cork, it was against the law to educate Catholic children in their own faith, and a young woman of the Cork gentry decided to do it anyway. Her name was Nano Nagle, and she was born in about 1718 at Ballygriffin near Mallow. She was educated in France, and returned to Ireland a woman of means who might easily have lived a comfortable life. Instead she opened small schools in the poorest lanes of Cork, at first in secret because of the Penal Laws. By day she taught, and at night she walked the lanes with a lantern to visit the sick and the old, which earned her the name Lady of the Lantern. The community of women that grew around her became the Presentation Sisters, who founded schools across Ireland and then across the world. Their classrooms opened in places from Newfoundland to Australia, and many Irish children on four continents learned to read in rooms that began with her lantern.
