Sir, – At the close of his recent television documentary on Catholic education in Ireland, Last Orders, Gay Byrne visited the grave of Br "Bill" O'Leary, the only Christian Brother he recalled with affection and respect.
I went through “Synger” about 10 years later and had similar experiences. In my Leaving Cert year, on Friday afternoons, “Bill” would regularly eject me from his religious knowledge class for “Heresy, boy!”, and then call me back in for his last maths class of the week. The latter was always spent in groups of three or four boys, around small blackboards balanced on desks, arguing the toss about geometry “cuts”, simultaneous equations and such.
He was an enlightened and enlightening teacher in an unenlightened world. – Yours, etc,
MARTIN RYAN,
Ballinderreen,
Co Galway.