Niall Leahy SJ
Niall Leahy SJ is the Director of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice.
Working Notes continues to be a flagship expression of the Irish Jesuits’ commitment to both the sacred and the secular sciences, and their mutually enriching collaboration. The Jesuits who founded JCFJ and launched Working Notes were inspired by the following expression of our mission:
“The mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement. For reconciliation with God demands the reconciliation of people with one another.”1
The decree, written during the Society’s 32nd General Congregation in Rome in 1975, went on to describe how social analysis was an essential tool for the fulfilling of that mission:
“We cannot be excused from making the most rigorous possible political and social analysis of our situation. This will require the utilization of the various sciences, sacred and secular, and of the various disciplines, speculative and practical.”2
Feedback from our readers indicates that this mix – the sacred and the secular – is one of the things that keeps them reading. While the journal has maintained this foundational commitment, Working Notes has clearly evolved over the years. As the title suggests, the original focus of Working Notes was employment and responses to the unemployment crisis of the 1980s, particularly in Ballymun. The format of the early issues was so basic that ‘Notes’ was deemed appropriate. It is worth accessing the online archive of back-issues to see the range of themes and issues the journal has engaged with since, all of which add to the telling of Ireland’s story in these decades.3
Like those early issues, this landmark issue has a homemade feel to it too. The editor normally invites essays from guest authors
and contributors, but for this one-hundredth issue, I asked each of JCFJ’s policy advocates to write a manifesto-style essay on their
particular area of expertise, reflecting the Centre’s convictions and commitments at this moment in time.
The first manifesto invites theology into engagement with analysis and policy. Our social theologian, Dr. Kevin Hargaden, sets the scene with the observation that cultural individualism has infected our society – Christians included – but that people are seeking the collective once again. The risk is that we will be re-socialised by the populist and tribalist cultural forces that are on the rise, rather than by a concern for the common good, and solidarity with the most vulnerable members of society. Against this backdrop,
Hargaden gives an account of Social Theology as a public exercise that engages with the secular sciences to generate policy proposals that promote human dignity and the common good. He makes the case that in a post-secular Ireland, Christian theology ought to make a faithful contribution to society rather than control it. We may consider JCFJ and ACET’s recent research project Faith in the North-East Inner-City as a proof of concept in the contemporary Irish context.4
The size of Ireland’s prison population is setting new records every month, and is now heading towards 6,000. The belief that
more prison is the obvious solution to prison crowding has lived rent-free in the Irish moral imagination for far too long. In Minimising Prison’s Excesses, Keith Adams offers four achievable steps towards penal minimalism in Ireland: independent investigations; ending prison expansion; a maximum cap on prison spaces; and the closing of female prisons. At a moment when the state could be sleepwalking towards the costly expansion of a malfunctioning prison system, Adams’ contribution could not be more timely.
At least the state knows how many people it has incarcerated. Our housing policy advocate Dr. Alexia O’Brien wishes the same could be said for our homeless population. She notes that there is no single housing crisis – there are multiple housing crises. O’Brien identifies hidden homelessness as one of them. The official homelessness figures only count those in emergency accommodation, but non-government sources point to other multitudes who don’t have a place to call home. In the North-East Inner-City where JCFJ’s office is located, hidden homelessness is hiding in plain sight. Our neighbouring Jesuit primary school, Gardiner St Primary School SJ, reports that 20% of its pupils are homeless or living in emergency accommodation, and we increasingly hear stories of people living in overcrowded accommodation. The Centre takes inspiration from our European neighbours both in how homelessness numbers are calculated and what policies are adopted. The European Commission’s Affordable Housing Plan offers many promising ways forward.
Recent events in Dublin’s city centre highlighted the importance of two environmental policy areas of commitment for the Centre. Dr. Ciara Murphy notes that the fuel-price protests highlighted two major weak points in our system: our over-reliance on cars for transport and our over-dependence on imported food and fertilizer. Murphy offers an alternative for transport, which puts the child rather than the car at the centre of spatial and political decision-making. As for our daily bread, the Centre is supportive of the burgeoning national and international agroecology movement which seeks to embed more food production and consumption within ecosystems and communities.
Finally, enjoy the reflections of our theological research assistant, Sophie Manaeva, who sat down with me to talk about her studies in the MPhil of Theology and Social Justice at Trinity College Dublin and her action research at The Bohemian Cooperatives.5 Manaeva is answering Pope Francis’ call to young people to build an economy with a soul.
May you find seeds of faith and justice for the future in this one-hundredth issue of Working Notes
Footnotes
- Society of Jesus, General Congregation 32, Decree 4, “Our Mission Today: The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice”, §2, (1975). ↩︎
- GC 32, Decree 4, §44. ↩︎
- Available at https://www.jcfj.ie/working-notes/past-issues/ ↩︎
- Keith Adams et al., Faith in the North-East Inner-City: How Faith-Based Communities Help Dublin to Flourish (Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, 2025), https://www.jcfj.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Faith-in-the-North-East-Inner-City.pdf. ↩︎
- Katlyne Armstrong, “Bohs Co-Op,” Bohemians Cooperative, Dublin, 2026, https://bohemians.coop/home/. ↩︎