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De
Valera's Bruree School was 100 years old in 1963
The centenaries of the foundations of Colleges are never
allowed to pass unnoticed, but when one of the humble national
schools of rural Ireland reaches its hundredth year there
is never a word about it. And not a few of them have already
passed the hundred year mark, un-honoured and unsung.
Some reach their centenary this year. Bruree school is one
of them. I am aware that the date 1862 is carved for all
to see on a slab that is set in the grey limestone wall
that looks out on the Maguire Bridge. But the records of
the Department of Education show that the school opened
for the first time on Monday, January 12th, 1863.
The erection of the school was estimated to cost £255,
of which £170 was to be met by a grant from the Board
of National Education, which was sanctioned on May 17, 1861.
The school was to be a one-room structure, with accommodation
for 100 pupils - it was subsequently extended to its present
size. The lessor of the site was Michael Ryan, Bruree. Rev
D Cregan, CC Bruree was appointed Manager. Manager and lessor
were named jointly as patrons.
The first principal was Andrew O'Keffe, who unlike Goldsmith's
Village Preacher, was not even passing rich with forty pounds
a years, for Andrew's yearly salary amounted to just £32.
His assistant was Ellen Lawlor, who was paid just £16
a year and a junior assistant, Johanna Russell, who took
up duty on March 1st, 1863, enjoying an annual salary of
£14.
Before the national school was built, the children of Bruree
went to hedge schools of which there were a number in the
parish. In the 1830s the parish had seven hedge schools
as well as a centre of instruction, described as a 'free
school' which was situated in The Glebe, endowed with half
an acre of land and supported by the Protestant Vicar. Two
of the hedge schools had on their rolls a total of 122 boys
and 68 girls; the other five made no returns of their attendances
. A hedge school existed at the Churchyard side of the river
in a place known locally as "Dell High: up to, it would
seem, the building of the present national school. I remember
one very old man who attended that hedge school; if I am
not mistaken he afterwards transferred to the new national
school. Probably the building of the new school spelt the
end of the hedge school or maybe, teachers and pupils moved
in a body to the new building and came under the Board of
National Education. But the traffic was not all in one direction
and not all the hedge schools disappeared with the coming
of the new national school. Even as late as the year 1866
we find in the Bruree school records such notes as: John
Moran, aged 5 of Clogher "sent to a hedge school held
in their own house", Pat Foley, aged 6, Ballynaught
"sent to a hedge school".
In 1869 Patrick Sullivan of Bruree was "kept home,
being too young", he was aged 3.
The causes of withdrawal of pupils from the school in the
1860s were frequently given in such terms as these "working
in Bruree Mills" (these were Ryan's Mills, which gave
much employment); "bound to his fathers trade",
"apprenticed to a miller", "apprenticed to
a cooper". One lad was appointed Parish Clerk and John
Cregan of Clogher was "appointed monitor in this school".
In these first years of its existence, pupils came to Bruree
school from such comparatively distant places as Rockhill,
Derawlin, Clonbrien, Cappagh and Dromin. The subjects taught
were: English Reading; grammar (phrasing and syntax); geography
- local and descriptive; arithmetic, practical and mental;
mensurration; algebra; geometry and writing - on slates
and paper. This list of subjects shows what a misnomer was
the description "national" when applied into such
a school and to all the other schools, built about that
time by the Board of Education. Not a word of Irish was
taught in them; not a word of Irish history. But the pupils
of all those Irish National schools had to learn the following
lines, which were printed in their readers:
"I thank the goodness and the grace,
Which on my birth have smiled,
And made me in those Christian days,
A happy English child",
That was the kind of "national" school that replaced
the time-honoured hedge schools of which Patrick Joseph
Dowling says in his book "The Hedge Schools of Ireland".
Writers have many of them described the hedge schools as
poor, inadequate, mischievous. But let the worst be said
of them and it may still with truth be maintained that they
represented a system of education truly democratic and truly
national. With their passing, the last link within the ancient
Gaelic schools of Ireland was severed. Most illustrious
pupil: The Maguire flowed within 20 yards of Bruree school,
but for almost half a century the pupils in that school
never learned a line from Slan le Maigh or from any of the
other poems that were composed by the Gaelic poets of the
Maguir countryside. Yet many of the lads and lasses who
learned their ABC in the new school in Bruree undoubtedly
came from homes in which the old people still spoke Irish
as their first language. Kate Coll of Knockmore was one
such. She left Bruree School on November 18th, 1871 at the
age of fifteen and a half and later went to America, where
she subsequently married. On the death of her husband her
baby son was brought back by an uncle to be reared in the
old home in Knockmore and began his schooling in Bruree
on a May day in 1888, under the headmastership of Thomas
McGinn. He was unquestionably the most illustrious pupil
of all those who have ever sat at a desk in Bruree school
in the hundred years of its existence. His name was Eamon
de Valera.
Many priests are numbered among the past pupils of Bruree
School and many nuns as well as doctors, teachers and men
of various other callings who became eminent in their chosen
walk of life. If all the past pupils were to be gathered
together again they would have to be called back from the
four quarters of the earth for they have strayed to almost
all the places they ever learned about in their school geographies.
End of the Story: Bruree school can, I feel, be said to
have begun to act the part of a real national school on
Monday, September 9, 1907, for that was the day the very
first Irish Lesson was taught in the school. The teacher
was Micheal O Conchubhair: Meetings, lectures, concerts,
practice ceilithe, these too, the old school has housed
down through the years; and it holds the secrets of ten
thousand votes cast in half a hundred elections. One thinks
of all the pupils and all the teachers who have passed through
its doors in the last hundred years. It would require a
book to do justice to the whole story.
I began my schooling in Bruree just as the long reign of
Garret Hayes was coming to an end. Garrett, a ,member of
a famous teaching family was brother of the distinguished
historian, Dr Richard Hayes, and was succeeded as principal
by his assistant, Donnchadh O hArgain, a past pupil of the
school. Donnchadh O hArgain spared no effort to give us,
among other things, a love of the Irish language, a love
of local history and a love of local history and a love
of the land. The first two loves he sought to inculcate
in the classroom, the third in the neat, well-tiled school
garden, where each pair of lads were allocated a plot of
their own.
I have happy and grateful memories of Bruree school and
would like to wish it something like Ad Multos Annos or
Faid Saoil. But there would be no point in that.
Courtesy of the Limerick Leader
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