Clare councillor quits politics to enter Catholic priesthood

A Clare county councillor is to stand down on Monday to pursue his vocation to the Catholic priesthood. Mark Nestor (30) was Fianna Fáil’s youngest candidate in Clare for the 2019 local elections when he was faced with the challenge of helping the party retain three seats in the Ennis Municipal District, which it did.

He took the third seat of seven available and was due to become mayor of Ennis earlier this year but, to everyone’s surprise then, he declined the role. Speaking on Friday, he said he had been considering the priesthood since his late teens and that “now is the right time to step down”.

His initial thoughts that he might have a vocation were in his late teens as he finished school, he explained, but he said “No” then, put off by “the various scandals” involving the Catholic Church at the time. “The environment was not very positive,” he told Clare FM Radio.

He took a degree in Irish and classical studies at NUI Galway but “still practised [his faith]”, becoming involved with a youth group and leading a pilgrimage to the ecumenical Taize retreat centre in France.

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Encouraged into politics

During those years he still struggled with whether he had a vocation. A decision was deferred a second time when, following discussion with his father, he was encouraged to give politics a try. “Give it a go,” his late father said, shortly before he took his own life. “I put it on hold but faith remained very, very important to me,” he said.

He was elected in 2019, but thoughts of the priesthood kept “niggling away”.

Listening to a priest give a homily on courage helped him make up his mind. The priest pointed out that “we don’t get courage, but the opportunity to be courageous”, he recalled. He spoke to close friends and, in March of this year, got in contact with the diocese (Killaloe). The insistence of his “call” has been “very strong”, he said. He will begin his training for the priesthood next Wednesday.

He has “no regrets about entering politics”, where colleagues of all parties had been “very supportive”. It offered “good days and bad days but the good days outweighed the bad days”, he said.

Fianna Fáil had “absolutely nothing” to do with his decision, he said, and he defended the party and the Government in its handling of the pandemic as well as the cost-of-living crisis. Both “were forced on the Government and completely out of its control” he said.

Had he stayed on in the council and had he accepted the role as mayor of Ennis, he felt he might have been tempted then to seek re-election and maybe then even a Dáil seat.

But his vocation was “the stronger calling”, he said. He was “very hopeful the experience of politics will stand to me [as a priest]”. He agreed the road he had chosen was one “very much less travelled” these days. The pandemic had helped. “It gave me time and space,” he said. Numbers of vocations these days were “quite low and I pray for vocations every day”.

He also agreed with calls by Irish Catholics in the national synthesis document recently sent to Rome. It was “very, very clear people want a church which is open and inclusive to all”, he said.