She smiles. “I think there’s a real appreciation in Navan for both Mary and Paddy.”

By now, Mary has returned to the room, perching herself on a high stool at the kitchen island as she reaches for her cup. “It is nice, yeah,” she concedes. “I mean, SuperValu is a nightmare!”

There is a good reason for these secret benefactors, considering everything that Mary and her late husband Patrick — or Paddy, as he was known — did for the people of their adopted hometown, and particularly for its women and children. Their hitherto largely unknown story is told in Pray for Our Sinners, a new documentary feature directed by Sinéad, herself a native of Navan. The powerful film documents acts of quiet resistance as it chronicles the story of Mary and Paddy, both GPs in the town, who in the 1970s went head-to-head with the Catholic Church, which at the time held the Irish population in its iron grip.

Sinéad was compelled to tell the story after an old schoolfriend, then mayor of Navan, told her about Paddy. The doctor passed away in 2017, but not without leaving an important legacy. He was instrumental in the drive to abolish corporal punishment in Irish schools by publicising the stories of local children who had been brutalised by the regime at Navan’s De La Salle school. No Irish newspaper would print his account, so he went to the UK’s News of the World. The story was later picked up for TV by NBC America. The international outcry piled pressure on the Irish Government to abolish the brutal practice, which was finally outlawed legally in 1982.

Having just finished her first documentary, A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot, Sinéad was not expecting to find her next project in her hometown.

“[My friend] said, ‘You should look at Paddy Randles, he just died,’” she recalls. “At the time, she was working to get a bench erected in his honour — which she managed to do. And she told me the bones of this insane story about priests hijacking a newspaper van [to stop people in Navan reading Paddy’s article in the News of the World in 1969], and I thought, it’s a brilliant story, but can we get a whole feature out of that? But at the same time, I thought, I have to at least speak to Mary about it.”

Sinéad struck up a friendship with Mary in 2017 and would call in to see her over the years, but mostly to talk about Paddy and his campaign.

“I had been speaking to her for several years before the subject of mother and baby homes even came up,” Sinéad says. “She was so determined to tell me about what Paddy had done. But it was actually only when the Mother and Baby Homes report came out in 2021 that she said, ‘Oh yeah, well we used to take women in here, they used to all be downstairs. And, actually, there was a couple of women we managed to take away from mother and baby homes, and Paddy used to loan his car to this man who would use it to drive to his partner in the mother and baby home,’ and all of these other remarkable things they had done for these women. So I was like, ‘Was there anything else you wanted to mention?’

“They were just doing so much, but they were so understated about it. And it was funny. In quite a sick way, I was like, ‘Yes! Now, there’s a feature,’” she says.

“And I think it’s a very rich feature now, in terms of subject matter; it’s packed. So I’m delighted that my friend prompted me to come down [to Navan] again,” she adds. “I’m used to working all around the world, but the best story was on my doorstep.”

Mary, for her part, remains both quick-witted and whip-smart at 84; kindness emanates from her. During the shoot, Sinéad says, she would make lunch for the crew between interviews. “That’s never, in the history of film shoots, ever, ever happened,” she says. Mary was on board the project from the get-go, although she says that she didn’t have any clue where it would ultimately lead.

“I remember you said to me, ‘Will you talk?’ and there didn’t seem any reason not to talk,” she says, addressing Sinéad. “I certainly didn’t grasp the enormity of the thing. As far as I was concerned, I was just a narrator, y’know? And I didn’t mind talking. It’s all still very alive in my head, so I didn’t have an awful lot of trouble remembering it. Of course, don’t ask me what I did yesterday,” she says. “But I really did sleepwalk into it.”

Beneath the kindness and empathy, however, there is a sense of steely resolve within Mary. It is a required trait if you are taking on the might of the church, as the Randleses did both literally and figuratively when they housed single mothers in their own home. In several cases, they rescued women and their children from the mother and baby home at Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, the same infamous home that oversaw the illegal adoption of Philomena Lee’s child in the 1950s.

The aforementioned Mother and Baby Homes report was widely criticised for not including the testimonies of any of its victims. In Pray for Our Sinners, we hear the compelling and often upsetting first-hand accounts of two local women the Randleses helped, Betty and Ethna — in Ethna’s case, they reunited her with her weeks-old baby after she was taken from Ethna in a maternity hospital without her knowledge or consent.

“I suppose what I really had on my side was that Mary wanted to do the film,” says Sinéad of convincing the women to tell their stories publicly.

“They all love her so much, and were so grateful to her for what she had done for them, so I think they were happy to help out, if they could. And we were filming a lot of it in Mary’s old house, so it was clearly a film that Mary was helping to make, too, so they were willing to participate. But I think there was a kind of shyness and…”

She pauses, gathering her thoughts.

“I suppose when you’ve been treated very badly, a terrible aspect of it is that you doubt yourself, because you’ve been treated so badly. And maybe that’s been true for a lot of people who suffered at the hands of the church. They have to go through a process of asking themselves, ‘Did it really happen?’ And maybe there’s some small part of them asking themselves, ‘Did I deserve it?’ I always think that’s one of the cruelties of abuse — not only are you abused but that you have to justify it to yourself afterwards. So I think [speaking publicly] was maybe part of the process.”

One aspect of the film that is important to emphasise, says Sinéad, is that the Randleses were Catholic themselves. In fact, two of Paddy’s brothers and a brother of Mary’s were priests. Their refusal to conform with the status quo on the corporal punishment issue — and later Mary’s involvement in setting up the first family planning clinic in Ireland outside of Dublin — led to them being labelled ‘anti-clerical’. Half of the patients at their practice left, they were forced to send their five children to school outside Navan, and were anonymously threatened and ostracised by many in the community.

“That was the biggest sin that you could commit, to be anti-establishment and wanting to subvert,” says Mary. “And also, that you were a runner-in. That you were coming into Navan — which was a small and incestuous sort of town — and criticising [it]. And, of course, that was very wrong, because Paddy happened to be living in Navan, but if he was in Ballydehob, or wherever else, he would have been saying exactly the same thing. So that was resented, and he certainly got a bad reputation, because you couldn’t criticise anything in Ireland in those days. Clericalism invaded every element of life. So that was a huge sin altogether.”

Mary is matter-of-fact about her own role in helping families in Navan through her family planning clinic, at a time when contraception was difficult to obtain in Ireland and with Pope Paul VI’s infamous 1968 ‘Humanae Vitae’ diktat still ringing in the ears of Catholics. Fear and shame were blatantly weaponised in a bid to control the population — but the Randleses were not afraid.

“I don’t want to sound egotistical about it, but if you believe in what you’re saying or what you’re doing, you’re not really bothered,” she says of reconciling the gap between her faith and her conscience.

“It’s not even a question of confronting people; you just do it. Introducing contraception to a town where women were having a baby every single year, up to 15 or 16 [children], it was a no-brainer, y’know? And if people didn’t agree with me, that was fine. I didn’t care. I wasn’t pushy about it. I just felt there was a need to provide this for women, and I wanted women to know that contraception was available to them if they wanted it. So I wasn’t bothered,” she says with a shrug. “It was like, if a new cake mixer or something came in — you’d say, ‘That’s a great idea, everybody should have one!’”

It seemed almost inhumane, she says, for a woman to need approval to engage in family planning. “I was a young doctor in my late twenties at this stage, and to go down into a dark confessional on a Saturday night in winter, and ask a priest for his consent to use contraception — that, to me, was crazy,” she says, shaking her head.

“I wasn’t mentally or emotionally upset about it, or anything — it just seemed silly. Why are you asking him, of all people? You might as well ask the bus driver what he thinks! It was crazy. The power was crazy. And particularly the male domination thing. Just imagine now, going to a man and asking him what did he think; could you use contraception?” She throws her hands up, still in disbelief, even decades later. “Off-the-wall stuff.”

Although the stories about the victims of the mother and baby homes comprise a critical strand of Pray for Our Sinners, so too does that of corporal punishment. We hear the testimony of Norman, a man who was forced to leave school at the age of nine to work in a factory, after being subjected to tortuous beatings at the hands of the Christian Brothers. Randles recounts bumping into him recently, as she often does with many people that she and Paddy helped around Navan.

“He was a different man, he really was,” she tells Sinéad. “I think because he’s got a bit of recognition. I felt like he’d grown, and we had a long chat about the whole thing. And I felt [participating in the film] had given him a sense of his own worth; that what he thought and said was respected. So it was really very interesting.”

Mary is particularly buoyed by the positive reaction among younger people, many of whom approached her after the film’s recent Irish premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival.

“I honestly was amazed,” she says, shaking her head. “I really didn’t think they would be into it. I thought this was old hat, y’know? But the number of people who came up to me at the screening that night — all young people.” She grins. “My kids are like, ‘She’s at it again — there she goes…’”

There have also been screenings at festivals in Canada and the US, where Sinéad says that the reaction was unexpected in a different way.

“It’s a funny one, because it was interpreted a little differently there,” she agrees. “My premise was, ‘Wow, finally a good news story about that era in Ireland,’ whereas they just watched it in a kind of horror. And they also could not believe the quietness of the people, and how they expressed themselves. Whereas, to me, that’s one of the joys of the film — how gentle, and modest, and quiet it is. One of the titles we considered was Acts of Quiet Resistance, but it just felt so understated that we worried nobody would bother going to see it.”

Finding the right title, she says, was challenging; it was initially known as In a Small Irish Town, but their sales agent encouraged them to change it.

“I guess I’m worried that the title won’t play so well in Ireland, because people will think it’s a dismal story,” she says. “And while there’s undoubtedly suffering, there’s also something really uplifting about it. It’s about resistance, and how there is always a way to resist.”

Although the film is not a close-fisted denunciation of the church — there is nuance to the overall picture, and Sinéad makes sure to include the flipside of people’s devotion, particularly to charismatic local priest Fr Andrew Farrell — there is clearly still a lot of work to do in terms of the church/State divide. They are both also critical of the Government’s redress scheme for victims of mother and baby homes, which Sinéad describes as “appalling and so inadequate”.

“Someone like Betty is entitled to the most minimum payment, €5,000, because they made a judgment on time,” she says. “So because she spent less than six months there, she’s entitled to so little. That is not how you measure someone’s trauma, or experience, or upset — and everyone knows that. So it’s not about the amount of money, but this message that’s been sent to her, which is, ‘Your suffering is worth the least.’ That’s an appalling aspect of the redress scheme. And then the babies born to these women who are illegally adopted, they’re entitled to nothing. It’s just mindblowing. So that’s something that’s ongoing, and you just think to yourself, where is the will to resolve this? There shouldn’t be a hierarchy of victimhood.”

Mary agrees, but is a little softer in her approach. “I feel that you can’t measure it with money, but on the other hand… it’s showing an empathy with them,” she argues. “It doesn’t work to equate it with money but, on the other hand, there is the other side — society respecting that they were wronged, and they were abused, they were tortured. So that the Irish people would say to her, ‘Look, we’re sorry for what happened to you. We can’t undo it, but this is the best that we can do.’”

At the time we speak, the film had not yet screened in Navan. Unsurprisingly, neither Mary nor Sinéad are bothered by the potential fallout in a community which, like so many others in Ireland, remains in the grip of the church to varying extents. As the film so deftly and poignantly illustrates, the collusion between the church and those in positions of power has had devastating ramifications for generations of Irish people. It is important, says Sinéad, to keep asking questions.

“I suppose that’s some aspect of the film too, that it’s not all in the past; that church and State collusion is a reality, still,” she says. “Look at the ownership of the [primary] schools, and how the church controls over 90pc of them. Look at the lack of information there is for people who’ve been adopted. And there are still so many children unaccounted for, whether they’re missing babies in mother and baby homes who haven’t been excavated properly, or people who’ve been adopted who can’t trace their origins… there’s an awful lot of unanswered questions, still.” She drains her teacup as Mary rises to boil the kettle again, always on hand to help. “So, ideally, we’d like the film to celebrate a resistance, a true resistance that happened — but maybe to also inspire people to keep asking questions.” She smiles, a steely grimace this time. “Because it is complacency that’s the most dangerous thing of all.”​

‘Pray for Our Sinners’ is released on April 21