The life of St Ita of Kileedy
She made her way west to Hy Conaill in what is now County Limerick, and there, at a place called Killeedy, founded a community of women that also became known, in time, as a place where boys were raised who would go on to become significant figures in the Irish Church; among those in her early care, from the age of one until he was six, was the boy who grew up to be remembered as Brendan the Voyager. She held herself and her community to a strict discipline of poverty, prayer, and fasting.
As is common with the earliest Irish saints, the record of her life that has come down to us is thickly overlaid with later legend, and much of the specific detail cannot be checked against any independent source; even so, there is no real reason to doubt that she was a genuine historical figure rather than a later invention. Later Irish tradition ranks her among the foremost women saints of Ireland, by some accounts second in honor only to Brigid, though that ranking rests on tradition rather than on anything that can be independently checked. She died around the year 570, after a long and difficult illness, at roughly ninety years of age.
