‘Nobody Will Even Remember It’: An Oral History of the Contribution of the Teaching Religious in Ireland (II)* Brendan Walsh The impact of free education What the experience of working with the religious was like for their lay colleagues between the 1940s and the late 1970s largely depends upon time and place. Bryan MacMahon recalled how in the 1940s and 1950s a Brother would, each year, visit the school ‘seeking postulants’ and ask ‘the children who would like to join our order [to] please come out into the corridor one by one’, adding that ‘invariably some of the happiest rascals in the school’ would ‘relieve the tedium of the school day by volunteering’ for ‘a chat with the august visitor’.1 Yet even MacMahon’s reservations about the religious are qualified. It is ‘the greatest mistake’, he commented, to ‘pass judgement on “then” in the context of “now”’. ‘Superficial’ media commentators and ‘historians of the shallower kinds’ were too often tempted to secure a ‘cheap laugh’ at the expense of ‘the Catholic Church’.2 The reflections of Fr McQuillan of St Columb’s College are pertinent in this regard: ‘[W]e were paid by the State but ... told to keep £120 for the year and the rest we signed over to the Bishop ... [t]his money was used to keep the board and tuition fees very low ... [allowing] the State to save millions...’.3 The religious interviewed here often raised this subject, in particular regarding their role in implementing the free education scheme. Sister Evelyn’s comments are illustrative: ‘I don’t think it could have happened … except for all the work the religious did ... we would have had maybe three first-year classes and all of a sudden there were six but the Department had no idea ... they had no inspector that understood the running of a school and there was nobody in the government that understood it ... I don’t know where the money came from, we had to buy desks and chairs ... I don’t think the department was awake enough to realise the [change]’.4 As enrolment numbers grew after the introduction of free education, Studies • volume 110 • number 438 201 Sister Boniface and a fellow Sister spent summers in the 1970s painting classrooms, recalling that ‘it wasn’t fair on the pupils and teachers’ to have ‘crowded, tatty’ rooms.5 It was ‘very difficult’ to get money from the Department, the ‘nun’s salary went into the school and we hadn’t half enough’. Indeed, writing of the Belvedere Jesuits, Paul Andrews noted that most Catholic secondary schools in nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland ‘were almost all subsidised by a religious community’, adding that ‘money did not enter into the motivation of individual Jesuits ... there was no such thing as looking for … remuneration for work done’.6 Sister R recalled that ‘we were very poor when I entered ... we had nothing, we had a habit and we had to mend it ... until it disappeared ... we never had a penny’. The cost to the religious, the saving to the Exchequer and the history of the transition as it impacted on fee-paying schools has yet to be ascertained. The relationship between the teaching religious and their lay colleagues was influenced by school type, the traditions of the order, the disposition of management, the absence of controversy such as school closures, capacity to adapt to social change and the strength or otherwise of professional relations. A 1968 article by Seán O’Connor, then Assistant Secretary in the Department of Education, reflected the contemporaneous dynamic of transition. Writing in the Jesuit journal Studies of the ‘problem’ of church/state relations ‘in respect to education’ and the position of the lay teacher, he concluded that ‘[n]o one wants to push the Religious out of education ... [b]ut I want them in it as partners, not always as masters’. The article caused intense public debate resulting, for example, in the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch proclaiming that ‘a religious spirit should vivify the whole work of the school’.7 Indeed, responding to O’Connor’s description of the lay teacher in religious schools as ‘always the hired man’, one...
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Apr 1, 2022
James R Barrett 
Open Access