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Olivia Mary Taaffe (1832–1918), founder of St Joseph's Young Priests Society, was born in 1832 in Annagh House, Ballyglunin, seven miles from Tuam, Co. Galway.
Olivia and her sister (later Sr Mary Ignatius of the Presentation Sisters, Midleton) were raised by their grandmother and two aunts. Olivia was tutored by a succession of French governesses and completed her education in Paris; as a result she spoke and wrote French , and her character and religious sensibilities owed much to her love of France and the impression made on her by the splendour of the second empire of Napoleon III. She married John Joseph Taaffe of Smarmore Castle near Ardee, Co. Louth in 1869.
From 1867 onwards she was a lifelong friend of Canon Joseph Léon Roy, who established an archconfraternity and shrine to promote devotion to St Joseph at Maranville, 160 miles from Paris. She now became, in effect, administrator and secretary of an Irish branch of this archconfraternity. In 1895 she persuaded Fr Joseph Darlington SJ to publish St Joseph's Sheaf, an Irish edition of the archconfraternity's La Gerbe de St Joseph, and a ‘drawing-room meeting of workers for the apostolic students of St Joseph’ (nucleus of what became known from 1898 as the St Joseph's Young Priests Society) financed the education of two Irish boys who wished to serve as priests in China and the far east. Taaffe's enthusiastic support for the foreign missions gave ample coverage to fund-raising events, which were remarkably successful, not least because of the entrée she enjoyed in fashionable society. These activities were at first almost exclusively presided over by her and a few friends. However, before she died (3 May 1918) she ensured with the help of Browne and Darlington that the Society was so organised that its work would continue to flourish. By 1923 it was financing the education of 36 boys in various Irish colleges.
