The parliamentarian and philosopher, Edmund Burke, a younger cousin of Nagle who spent part of his childhood in her birthplace, described those laws: "Their declared object was to reduce the Catholics in Ireland to a miserable populace, without property, without estimation, without education.

[2] Originally known as "de Angulo" or "D'Angulo", they were connected to some of the most prominent local families, and their ancestors had lived in the area for hundreds of years.

However, after the Williamite War in Ireland, the Nagle (as they were now known) family's loyalty to the exiled Catholic King James II led to many of their ancestral lands being confiscated by the government.

[5] Nano Nagle is believed to have attended a local hedge school, like her cousin Edmund Burke, before she travelled to France to complete her education.

After one of these parties, "she noticed a group of wretched-looking people huddled in a church doorway" and was struck by the contrast with her privileged life.

Their mother died soon after, and Nagle returned to Paris intending to enter an Ursuline convent, but a religious director advised her to help the poor of her own country instead.

She described in a letter her ideas for education, and how she wanted the spiritual and temporal welfare of her pupils to be interwoven and to flow naturally together.

Nighttime ministries to poverty-ridden elderly and sick in her hometown gave Nagle the nickname The Lady with the Lantern.

In 1767, she stayed with the Ursuline Sisters in Paris while visiting her cousin Margaret Butler, who had been professed the previous year.

In 1771, Nagle sponsored the first Ursuline convent in Ireland, a community of four women in Cork city who were professed in Paris, together with a reverend mother.

On Christmas Eve 1775, she founded the Society of Charitable Instruction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Cork, the first convent of what would later be the Presentation Sisters.

In 1854, sisters travelled from Ireland to San Francisco, California, and within two weeks opened the first of many schools in the United States.

[18] Nano Nagle Place, surrounding her original 1771 convent in Cork city, includes her tomb, museum, and archive.