To appreciate the magnitude of what Nano Nagle and Edmund Rice achieved in founding the Presentation Sisters, the Presentation Brothers and the Irish Christian Brothers, and the contribution the early Sisters and Brothers made to education in Ireland, it is necessary to call to mind the appalling social conditions and the harsh religious persecution which prevailed in Ireland at the time. The Penal Laws were the culmination of over five hundred years of armed invasion and domination by a foreign power. These Laws were the legislative expression of English policy; their aim was to ensure that Ireland would be destroyed, politically, militarily, and economically. The Irish were to be reduced to the status of serfdom, to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for the Ascendancy.

There was a golden age when Christianity flourished in Ireland, when the monastic movement and missionary activity were at their height. At a time when pagan tribes were rampaging across the continent, Christianity and learning which had been nurtured in the peace and tranquility of Ireland was being replanted among the ruins of the Roman Empire. The network of monasteries founded by Irish missionary monks throughout Europe, the exchange of manuscripts, texts and historical documents and their preservation in the monastic libraries, meant that Ireland was no longer regarded as an isolated island on the edge of the known world as it had appeared to the Romans.

But Nano Nagle and Edmund Rice lived out their lives and achieved what they did in a very different time, during what was arguably the darkest period in Irish history.

18th Century Ireland was a place of poverty, ignorance and despair.