Right Reverend Peter Birch (4 September 1911 – 7 March 1981) was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Ossory from 1964 until his death in 1981.
He served as a guide and mentor to Sister Stanislaus Kennedy who, in 1974, was appointed by the Irish Government as the first chair of the National Committee on Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty.
[1] Following ordination he gained a Higher Diploma in Education and in 1938 joined the teaching staff at St Kieran's College.
[3] One sympathetic profile of Bishop Birch noted how his position in the socially conservative Irish hierarchy "devoted to the progressive ideals of Vatican II, he encouraged an open, active catholicism, which made him an unpopular, and often peripheral, figure in the Irish hierarchy.
His support for the travelling community and his calls for an improvement in the conditions of rural women further alienated him from prevailing catholic orthodoxy.