Catholic Schools in Ireland, an analogy to GAA clubs

[scolairebocht]

I find that the argument against the take over of Irish Catholic schools is so prejudged by people, based on very inaccurate media coverage over a long period of time, that it seems better to phrase this as an analogy with the GAA, obviously the Irish sports body governing Irish national games. What I am suggesting here is that there could be an argument to 'diversify' Ireland away from its obsession with Gaelic games, and that many of the sports facilities owned by the GAA around Ireland ought to be taken away from them and given to minority sports and their communities. It is a fictional - I hope! - scenario but quite closely analogous to this ongoing debate about Irish schools.


Too many sports facilities in Ireland owned by one sporting group, in a diverse country

First of all the complaint would be, that since we live in a diverse country then it is a complete scandal that most parishes and towns around Ireland do not have cricket pitches etc, to accommodate the huge Muslim and other communities out there. These 'minority' (actually they are the majority in many places now) groups are being victimised by having to travel distances to attend their sports when you have perfectly good GAA pitches around the place which therefore should be handed over to them.

Hopefully people would be scandalised by that kind of argument. The vast majority of Irish people over a long period of time, want and wanted to support these Irish sports and not cricket etc and what is wrong with the majority of Irish people creating and patronising their majority sport? Of course you have most towns and villages in Ireland with GAA pitches because most towns and villages were occupied by Irish people who wanted these facilities, what could be more natural, just or proper? And the corollary is, that to claim 'diversity' as some grounds of the theft of these facilities would be very unjust, improper and a very unnatural thing to do, surely.


GAA as a state funded body

The second argument you could hear, in this admittedly fictional - as yet - debate, is that since the GAA is state funded then they are compelled to hand over their facilities to minority groups like this.

Yes the GAA is now, to quite a large extent, state funded. The County GAA teams are paid by the state in Ireland now, and have been for many years. The national GAA authorities are also funded by the state, for example the Irish Times on the 10th Feb 2022 reported that they received €50 million over the previous two years ( https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/ga...of-25-2m-despite-government-funding-1.4798903 .) Also frequent miscellaneous development type grants are given to GAA clubs, here for example is a list of state grants given to GAA clubs to develop 'walking track' facilities: https://assets.gov.ie/253685/e7467dab-5fd5-4198-8e1f-5ecc7f46613f.pdf , and, as another random example, Castlerahan GAA Club in Co. Cavan in Feb 2024 were looking for €200,000 from the state to fund their latest pitch and facilities improvements: https://www.independent.ie/regional...itious-1m-redevelopment-plans/a963614512.html . But I would suggest that there is two simple counter arguments to this:

Firstly the majority of tax payers are also GAA supporters, or at least a lot more of them than cricket supporters, and have been for many years, so what is wrong with their taxes going to fund GAA facilities? By what criteria does somebody decide that just because some of the funds going from the local communities to fund local facilities, go through the tax system, that therefore the 'minority' groups are entitled to half of it or at least a grossly disproportionate part of that tax take than GAA supporters? Secondly it should be argued, that while yes there is a lot of state funding in the GAA system, now, and has been for many years, it still pales completely into insignificance when set against the gigantic amount of voluntary labour and land and money that poured into the GAA from local communities for the best part of a century and half. Hopefully then people can see that this also, is a very unjust and improper argument to make.


This analogy applies to Irish Catholic Schools

Yes, believe it or not, this is entirely analogous to the situation involving Catholic schools in Ireland today. The same arguments, that, hopefully, seem scandalously unjust when set against the GAA, are routinely used against these schools without much counter debate.

Yes its true that in most towns and villages in Ireland you get a disproportionate number of Catholic schools as opposed to other faiths, or none, of course you do? What's so surprising about that in a country which is still overwhelming Catholic? Isn't that the natural, logical and just arrangement you would expect in a country with an overwhelming majority of Catholics? How is that a scandal in itself?

Secondly it doesn't seem to be commonly appreciated to what extent these schools were created out of the voluntary land, labour and money over many generations from generous minded and hard working Irish Catholics. It is by no means the case that these were all created by the Irish state at any time, generally speaking the land allocated for these schools, and to a huge extent the voluntary labour in keeping them running and putting up the funds to build them, was the voluntary labour of local Irish Catholics, particularily by nuns, brothers and parish priests. By what right does anybody have to steal these institutions from Irish Catholics now, to make way for atheist or Muslim schools etc? Yet that is exactly what the Powers That be in this country are blatantly trying to do.

Hopefully therefore by framing the arguments with this analogy with the GAA, people can see how unjust this is, and what follows are the experiences of one Irish priest which shows to what extent these schools are the products of the hard work of successive local Irish Catholics.

by Brian Nugent

 

[scolairebocht]

Fr Kieran Waldron on his experiences with schools in Counties Mayo and Galway:

"The new school at Corrandrum was built eventually and the sizeable local contribution was raised, with a surplus by a succession of ‘carnivals’ in a marquee - a festival of dances, for which Corrandrum became a well-known centre for big bands and major dances in later years.
...
However I did not question it and, as directed presented myself to Fr Costelloe on Monday morning-when the letter should have arrived officially. The school [in Ballyhaunis] was in the second year of its existence and, as it was expected there would now be four class-groups, three staff members already there would not be sufficient. So Fr Costelloe had asked the Archbishop for another helper. At that time, in the financial exigencies of running those schools, a priest was a less expensive staff member than a layman who would be entitled to receive the ‘basic salary’ of four hundred pounds per annum. This would have to come from the minuscule school funds made up largely from £15 annual fees for the pupils who had entered in the previous year. No school capitation grant had yet been received from the State as yet so the prospect of employing a lay teacher was, simply, not feasible.
...
I slotted into working happily under the local Superior [in the Mercy school in Louisburgh] who was School Manager and the School Principal, also a Sister of Mercy. In the provision of education and other social amenities, as indeed in all other matters, the sisters were highly efficient in management and were forever ‘on the job’. Those 'nuns, as they were popularly known, worked around the clock in running their schools but even cleaning classrooms, corridors and toilets.

The wonder was how the schools survived on a shoe-string! As I was to discover, they funded, from their own salaries, almost all the capital development and much of the running costs of their school and its improvement. And so they had financed the large school building, erected in the 1960’s, which incorporated five classrooms. Upstairs had been added a second storey - without the knowledge or consent of the archbishop - as a holiday centre for their colleagues in the Tuam group of convents. By the 1970’s this floor was occupied by some girls from Clare Island and Inishturk who had become boarders. Their brothers and cousins from the island found local lodgings down the village until, in later years, a few bedrooms in the former parochial house were re-cycled as dormitories for them. Both groups were fed in the Convents for a number of years until the Sisters found it too much of a responsibility. So for those few years, Sancta Maria College had advanced further - to become the only Catholic co-educational boarding school in the country.

The school and convent grounds were very constricted but a financial agreement had been made that the Sisters would acquire the former house of the Parish Priest when it became vacant, and the valuable few acres attached to it which eventually made space for a new school in the mid 1980’s and the development of sports grounds. In all, it was a school with a good outlook, favoured with the support of a greater proportion of the local people who now chose Sancta Maria in preference to boarding schools in Tuam, Galway, Claremorris and Tourmakeady which previous generations had attended. The school had in 1970 five teaching sisters, two lay teachers and myself. Some other junior sisters also helped in various dimensions, without qualifying for any salary.

There was a real need for a Science room, as Science had to be taught in a makeshift kitchen which doubled as a Cookery Room. When space became available after the extension to the grounds, it was decided we should apply to the Department of Education for the school’s first capital grant since the school opened in 1920. There was no middle management in schools at this time but the Sisters welcomed any assistance I could give. It was a long and arduous process. I remember a senior officer of the Department in Marlborough St Dublin asking me was it agreed that Louisburgh had no long-term future for a Senior cycle. I simply said it was not agreed. A grant was eventually approved for something like £2,000 for a pre-fab building, incorporating a Science Room and one extra classroom. The quality of the structure however was low-grade and the Sisters were prepared to supplement the grant to improve the standard by purchasing from another supplier.

‘Not so’, said the Department and the grant was withdrawn.

With much ado, a local politician secured a deputation to the then Minister for Education, Mr Padraig Faulkner. I was asked to accompany the School Manager, Sr Rita Carmody to Dublin on 29 July 1971.

The Minister adopted a rather gruff attitude and told us we were out of order. Only for the appeal of his one time Senior Minster, Mícheál Ó'Móráin, TD, he would not have seen us at all. We did our best in the counter-argument and eventually the Department made a reduced grant of £1,732 and a building was quickly provided but with an increased capital injection from the meagre convent funds. The two classrooms gave over fifteen years of valuable service, until they were superseded by a new school building in 1986.
...
The Louisburgh secondary school struggled throughout the 1970’s, billeted in three separate buildings: the main school built about 1,960, the pre-fab building incorporating a Science room and general classroom and the former parochial house of the parish where there were three totally unsuitable classrooms. In all these years the pupil intake was increasing and sooner or later a new building would have to be provided. The problem, as always, was to convince the Department of Education of the genuine need. There were several meetings and planning sessions with them but there was little or no movement.

One of our local TDs, Enda Kenny, was appointed a Minister of State at the Department of Education sometime in the 1980s and we tried to influence him to help us. I remember one occasion, while I was moving between classes from one building to another, noticing a local funeral just ending in the nearby parish church, I spotted Enda at the Church gate and I went out to him promptly and prevailed on him to accompany me into my class to see for himself the educational conditions in the Parish Priest’s house. Enda was a former teacher and quickly saw the problem. I don't know if it was this or whatever else progressed the decision but in 1984-85 the fine new facilities were provided and the official opening took place on 7 April 1986 to great local rejoicing by the same Enda Kenny who was himself to rise to become Taoiseach in 2011.
...
The local contribution for this major development was likely to reach up to £70,000. I was surprised to find that the Sisters of Mercy had the intention to try, yet again, to come up with the capital amount themselves from their own resources - the salaries of the teaching sisters and savings from other convents. The only input they really expected from local resources was perhaps a few harmless activities such as cake-sales etc. However, some of us felt that a local contribution should indeed be a local contribution and we started on a local fund-raising campaign, calling meetings in the feeder areas of the school: Louisburgh, Killeen and Lecanvey where we talked to the local people whose children would benefit from the school. An active fund-raising committee was therefore established and, as far as I can recall, the well-tried method of regular monthly contributions from the Station areas of the parish and the Lecanvey area swung into action. There were also a few mammoth Sales of Works on succeeding years on 17th March and the funds were put in place, augmented by a sizeable contribution from the Sisters of Mercy themselves.
...
It became a trying part of my life [becoming chairman of Tuam CBS] - all voluntary work, of course. Management boards do not receive any pay or stipend. I did not expect, however, that my involvement with St Patrick’s would continue for so long, though it was somewhat easier when I was transferred in 1993 to Killererin, which was just six miles from Tuam. In principle the board devolves the day-to-day working of a school to the Principal, but every major or contentious issue was inevitably referred to the Chairman in all those years. I tried to keep myself schooled on the many changes in education, but never having been a principal myself, I found it hard.

After about fifteen years of the work, I really did not think I was any longer able for that role but only in 2007 did I convince Archbishop Neary that I should be allowed surrender the chairmanship at least. I remained on the board until the school was amalgamated with the nearby St Jarlath’s College in 2009."
(Fr Kieran Waldron, The Light of Life, Memoirs of a Diocesan Priest (Ballyhaunis, 2015), p.16, 20, 46-7, 84-6, and 118.)

 

[scolairebocht]

"The media often portrays the clerical School Chairperson [of Barnaderg and Cahergal] as one who merely dictates to a board meeting four or five times a year. The truth is that it is a never ending responsibility in the service of the school. I took it on myself as Chairperson to apply formally to the Department of Education for a proper extension. Thus began a series of meetings at that time with their building unit then in Marlborough St in Dublin and the Office of Public Works then in St Stephen’s Green until later that section moved to Tullamore. I found that my former parish priest in Corrandulla was not far wrong: - ‘it takes sixteen years to build a new school’. A sub-committee of the Management board formed a Finance Committee and set out to raise the required local contribution of £25,000. In this they were highly successful. The wonderful new Barnaderg School was eventually opened twelve years later, in January 2006. The entire process of negotiation, letter-writing, phone calls, meetings and interviews had lasted all that time. It is a fact of life that those who have responsibility for school management have to work behind the scenes and suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ to an inordinate degree.

Cahergal School was a three-teacher school with just 77 pupils when I came to know it in 1993. It was one of those ‘Boyd-Barrett’ schools, named after their architect who had repeated them all over the country. It had three tiny classrooms, one full-length corridor in front with two tiny spaces for cloaks and toilets and nothing else. Cahergal had a great reputation nonetheless and its numbers were beginning to increase - it stretched to over 91 pupils in 1994 and was granted a fourth teacher. We took the easy way out and purchased a fifteen-year old pre-fab from Corrandulla school for £500. The Department would not give a grant but agreed to pay for the cost of transfer and re-erection.
...
All these building projects and all the board of management issues that are part of school-work nowadays have taken a lot of my time and energy. Immediately after the pupils moved into the new school in Barnaderg I retired as Chairman of that board and was delighted to be able to become an ordinary member and just attend the meetings supporting the Chairman, Bernard Keeley. I made a number of efforts to secure a new Chairperson for Cahergal Management Board but only succeeded in this just before I retired in 2011."
(Fr Kieran Waldron, The Light of Life, Memoirs of a Diocesan Priest (Ballyhaunis, 2015), p.129-130.)

 

[scolairebocht]

"Then there was the responsibility for primary schools which was somewhat new to me. It involved not merely visiting the two schools at Belcarra and Clogher as the local priest, but also, ex officio, I was the Chairman of the Boards of Management of both schools. The work of school management is hugely time-consuming, something totally underestimated by the general public, who often consider it just as an exercise of power. Especially in those years when school principals had no back-up in-school resources and, by the Department’s rule, the Chairperson had to be the official liaison person with the Department of Education, much of the day-to-day management fell on the local priest.

As both schools were in the process of building extensions, all correspondence and negotiation in connection with the extensions fell to me. I must say that I took on the task with alacrity - though after twenty three years more of that thankless service, I have since grown somewhat disillusioned about it...The local contribution to such a project was technically one third of the capital cost but was, I think, negotiated to something like one fifth - still a sizeable amount-, I do not have access to the files now but it probably involved something like £25,000. This was raised effectively by a monthly contribution collected in the school area and the campaign was ably conducted by a committee under one of our Board members."
(Fr Kieran Waldron, The Light of Life, Memoirs of a Diocesan Priest (Ballyhaunis, 2015), p.98-9.)

 

[Myles O'Reilly]

Bocht you have a serious hard-on for the Catholic church. I don't quite get the obsession myself.

 

[scolairebocht]

I think Irish people's faith, that is that they have a true understanding of the way the Universe is set up as explained by the traditional Catholic faith, is the best and most important thing about them.