An Irishman's Diary

IN THE part of Monaghan that produced my paternal ancestors, there were several different McNally families. So of course, to distinguish them, they needed nicknames. As readers will know, the Irish nicknames system is notoriously arbitrary, and often unfair. A minor indiscretion by a single great-grandparent can be applied in perpetuity to all offspring, with no right of appeal.

But as it happens, our family escaped lightly. At some moment in history, now untraceable, we became the “College” McNallys. Not, it seems, because any of the founding fathers went to university, a highly unlikely event, I’m told. The nickname has humbler origins, in that the homestead once housed a hedge-school, aka “the College”. I can’t even be sure they attended that.

Even so, the sobriquet has followed us down several generations now, and it sounds good. I sometimes think I should use it in abbreviated form after my name, on formal letters and CVs. There must be some privileges attached to the birthright. In fact, if UCD or Trinity don’t do the decent thing in the meantime, I may eventually have to confer myself with an honorary doctorate.

They are many misconceptions about hedge-schools: the most common being that they always involved hedges. On the contrary, many – probably most – were indoors, in barns and such places. Nor, although synonymous with the Penal Laws, were they an exclusively Catholic phenomenon. Protestant non-conformists used them as well, and so did some poorer Church of Ireland children.

There’s a paradox there too, in that while hedge schools are associated with poverty, they were essentially fee-paying, private institutions. The extent to which they taught Latin and Greek may have been exaggerated, and no doubt many hedge-masters were charlatans.

But for various reasons, some of which must have must have been the quality of service, they continued to exist long after a national school system was set up in 1831. They were still around in the 1870s. And the National Library has a photograph of an old cottage in Mayo, said to have housed a hedge school as late as 1892, before a government-funded institution finally replaced it.

I MENTION all of this because today marks a major anniversary of one of the better-known Irish hedge-school graduates, whose own work in the field of education would have far-reaching effects.

Yes, it’s exactly 250 years ago since Edmund Rice was born near Callan, Co Kilkenny. Whence he grew up in an Ireland where Catholics still couldn’t teach, officially anyway.

Instead, a system of proselytising education had evolved, whereby it was originally hoped that, as one account put it, “the children of Popish natives may be so won over by affectionate endeavours that the whole nation may become Protestant and English”. The plan wasn’t working very well even by the late 1700s, and had in fact been somewhat amended by law. But Rice, more than any other individual, delivered the coup de grace.

He was not himself a religious brother, at least not at first. On the contrary, by his mid-20s, he was both a husband and successful businessman in Waterford. It took the untimely death of his wife, during the fateful year of 1789, to set him on his own revolutionary path. Deeply affected, he thereafter devoted himself charity work, setting up such bodies as the “Waterford Society for Visiting and Relieving Distressed Room-keepers”.

It was thanks to education, however, and the more catchily-titled “Christian Brothers”, that he would become famous. In fact, he first helped set up a girls school in Waterford, under the Presentation Sisters. Only then did he go about doing the same thing for boys. So on both sides of the gender divide he was a founder of what would eventually become a sort-of Irish empire, shadowing the British one, as it built schools first in Ireland and Britain, then in Africa, India, Australia, and beyond.

Interestingly, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the early Christian Brothers (circa 1810) were unusual for their time in putting “strict limits on corporal punishment”. This was a concept that would get lost somewhere along the way.

Not the least damning verdict of Rice’s latter-day heirs was that they were one of the few subjects about which Myles na gCopaleen, late and great of this newspaper, could not be funny. In 1965, recalling his 1920s education in CBS Synge Street, he claimed that “no matter how assiduous or even intelligent a student was, he was bound to get a hiding every day of his school life”.

And he added: “I would not be bothered today to denounce such people as sadists, brutes, psychotics, I would simply dub them criminal and expect to see them jailed.” But Rice could hardly have foreseen the excesses of some of his disciples. Nor, perhaps, could he have foreseen the political influence his institution would one day wield. In any case, in the decades after his death, the Christian Brothers became enthusiasts for Irish nationalism. More than WB Yeats, who worried about such things, they may have sent out certain men the English shot.

Rice himself was not overtly political. He was concerned mainly with religion and with the betterment of the uneducated poor. And these joint aims were well summed up the location of his first school in 1802. Although he sold his business to finance the plan, it was still a modest start for the future empire. Thus, in an echo of both the hedge-school system and a certain Biblical story, the Christian Brothers began life in a stable.

[ fmcnallyirishtimes.com ]