They went in their thousands, men and women, Catholic (and many Protestant too) from the end of the 19th century until quite recently.Their reach stretched right across the globe from Africa to the Far East, to the Americas and Australia and other places.
They were the Irish missionaries who have left an indelible mark on the world - perhaps even the most significant contribution made by the Irish race.
Remarkably, nowadays, they barely ever enter the national consciousness.
Watching the first part of the RTE documentary, On God’s Mission, last week, one began to realise their significance, and wonder why their remarkable contribution was so little celebrated in Ireland today.
From the middle of the 19th century, all sorts of people began to descend on Africa, for a variety of reasons. Most were imperial adventurers seeking their fortune, but central to the Victorian notion of ‘civilising’ Africa was the saving of what they regarded as pagan souls.
The most celebrated of these was the great Scottish medical missionary turned explorer, David Livingstone, who blazed his way across the then unknown continent. Livingstone’s missions had an imperial and colonial sub-text.
As he himself put it: ‘‘My aim is to open a path that civilisation, commerce and Christianity might find their way there, and from this bridgehead, all of Africa would be opened for commerce and the Gospel."
So from the beginning, the proselytising of Africa was part of a wider imperial project. The Victorian mission was an essential part of the colonial process - here Christ and Caesar were hand-in-glove, as they would both proselytise and colonise.
Curiously, one of the original driving forces behind the huge explosion in missionary societies in the 18th century was the anti-slavery movement. Almost as a reflex of that epic debate which split British society across three generations, the missionaries set out in a spirit of reparation for what had been done to Africa in the name of civilisation.
In response to the 19th century British evangelical missions, the Catholic countries of Europe - including France, Belgium and Portugal - began to send missionaries to Africa and China. Very soon, the Irish missions began.
In post-famine Ireland, youngmen and women joined religious orders in very large numbers.
Many would join missionary societies and soon they were undertaking unimaginable journeys to places on the edge of the known world.
What was significant and different about the Irish was that they were coming from a society in which, at the turn of 20th century, the whole business of colonisation was at the centre of affairs.
Missionary work had been a significant tradition in the early Irish Church, and the new generations of the early 1900swere aware that they were heirs to a very ancient tradition.
Importantly, the Irish who went (particularly after Irish independence) were significantly different from other European Catholic missionaries, in that they came from a society which itself had been colonised.
Uniquely, they were the only English speaking missionaries in Africa who understood the wider impact of colonisation.
They saw it from an entirely different perspective to British, French or Belgian missionaries, who came from imperial cultures. What was then under way in Africa was already part of the Irish cultural and political experience.
The thousands of Irish flocking into Africa brought with them their unique perspective.
As a result, the relationship they formed with Africans was significantly different from that of other missionaries - and, in its own way, was to play a significant part in the later emergence of independence movements on that continent.
The Irish were not part of a wider colonial ambition which, as Livingstone memorably said, sought civilisation, commerce and Christianity; their ambitions were certainly religious, but also educational, and they encouraged self help.
They were, so to speak, saving souls for God, not for empires.
In the hundreds of missionary schools which the Irish ran, the cultural consensus that had come to dominate Europe’s relationship with Africa was first questioned. It wasn’t intended, but it was a logical consequence of how the post independence Irish in Africa were thinking.
Among the African leaders who came out of these schools were figures such as Julius Nyerere and Robert Mugabe, who later became central to independence movements in their own countries.
The Irish missionaries were not teaching revolution, but their own life experience.
Their culture and history influenced their teaching, and they saw the relationship between Africa and Europe in a very different way to how other white Europeans saw it.
The relationship between Irishwomen missionaries and African women was important, too.
From the outset it began a process leading to the equality and liberation of many African women.
The missionaries had an immense battle in the beginning, insisting that girls be educated equally with boys and, later, that women could become nuns. I once met the late Bishop Hurley in South Africa in the 1980s, and he spoke at length about how Irish nuns had developed a very deep relationship with African women that had left a significant mark on African society.
In graveyards across the world lie the bones of these thousands who left to give and to serve. I have always felt that we at home underestimated their contribution and forgot that they gave up so much at home.
They left their families and their homeland for years.
Many were imprisoned, tortured, killed; many more died in the field.
Any foreign correspondent will tell you that, in the most obscure corners of the world, there would always be Irish priests or nuns running schools, hospitals and orphanages.’
A new generation of young Irish are following their lead in voluntary overseas organisations. But somehow a century of missionary selflessness seems to have been forgotten in the national narrative.
The second part of On God’s Mission will be broadcast on Tuesday at 10.15pm on RTE One.
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