St. Patrick's NS: Glanworth 🌞“I’m back again in Glanworth where the Funcheon waters flow,
Where meadows green are always seen and the summer sun doth glow,
The rippling rills and heathclad hills will always meet your eye,
From Rockabbey’s ruins to Labbycally Hill that borders sweet Fermoy.”
So wrote one Annie M. Daly almost ninety years ago on returning to Glanworth after a sojourn in Australia and thereby enunciating an attachment to her native area that even sunnier climes and the exciting prospects of a new world could not overcome.
For indeed for many of us Glanworth is as much a state of mind as it is a place. While the several ruins and remains that date from former times remind us of a glorious past it is the common bond of our shared existence in this special place that binds us together – Glanworth is its people and to have gone to school there was for most of us the inauguration into this extended family.
In school we shared intimately our joys and our sorrows, our jealousies and our dislikes, our regrets and our ambitions. While this sharing touched our lives outside of the school, the school was the focal point of a closeness that developed during those formative years into a relationship that is lifelong and undeniable. More so than churchgoing, footballing or any other communal activity the daily association in school over a period of anything up to eight years or more could not but leave its mark!
The value of a good education has been part of the Irish psyche for centuries and no less than any other part of the country the people of Glanworth have always been aware of the economic worth of a little learning. The hedge school tradition was well established in the parish at the time of the Government surveys of 1826 and 1835.
Though no longer on the sunny side of the ditch the schools of those years were not much better than hovels – yet the numbers of these establishments and their attendances are impressive. These were all private undertakings where the children paid fees according to the curriculum provided.
In Glanworth village in 1826 there were three schools catering for 320 pupils while another school in Corbally had an enrolment of seventy. However the haphazard nature of this provision is evident in the survey of 1835 where we find that all of the earlier schools had disappeared and had been replaced by seven newly established undertakings.
On the other hand the education of Protestant children was well catered for. As early as 1805 a school supported by the local rector was built at Close, across the road from present day Barry Park. It was described as an ‘excellent slated building’ and the education provided was free. In the 1820s half of the forty odd pupils were Catholic and this situation was a cause for much concern among the local clergy.
The setting up of the National system of education in 1831 turned out to be saviour of the Catholic Church in Ireland as far as primary education provision was concerned. What was conceived as a nondenominational
system soon became in fact denominational largely funded by the state but under local management usually headed by the parish priest. Likewise the lack of control over the independent schools was solved at the same time.
In Glanworth the parish priest Fr. Kelleher left £100 in his will in 1835 towards the erection of a national school there but it was to be thirteen years before his wish came to fruition. It seems that a site could not be acquired from the local landlords until one was finally donated by the Greens of Airhill at Boherash in 1845. Even then it took three years before the legalities were ironed out and the building was completed.
It is worth noting that all of this took place during the height of the Famine and even as the school opened on 26th June 1848 the consequences of that catastrophe were more than obvious locally as the parish population headed towards a drop of more than 40%. The original school was a single storey building deemed sufficient in design to accommodate 300 pupils.
Thirty years later it was converted to the twostoreyed building that many of us remember – during the work arrangements were made to allow the functioning of the school to continue in the mill. It would seem that the school was originally located at the point where the Dairy Cross road joined the String road as they intersected the Kildorrery road i.e. the school fronted onto the roadway.
The change in the alignment of this crossroads was necessitated by the laying of the railway line beside the school in 1891 and this resulted in providing the school with a playyard towards its front. When national education arrived in Glanworth in 1848 the old pay schools did not die out immediately. Some survived for more than twenty years and indeed local folklore still celebrates John Courtney’s famous academy.
Master Courtney had sixty five pupils as late as 1868 and he was renowned for his skill in mathematics. His memory is honoured still in verse even if it is only to show that the nature of those who attend such establishments doesn’t change:
When showing in paper how we should extract the root from square,
The Master struck a settled point upon his súgán chair.
He leaped three feet into the air, his face denoting pain
And swore by the great St. Patrick, “The Devil is in Tom Lane”.
Glanworth National School functioned as two separate schools from the beginning as boys and girls were educated separately. This situation continued until 1969 when they were reorganised as a single school. By this time the old school had been closed and replaced by the present building. The necessity for a new school had been acknowledged for many years and happily the coincidental discovery by the Archbishop of Boston of his paternal roots in the early 1950s eased the burden of local fundraising.
The Cushing Memorial School was opened in August 1958 and in September the pupils made the transfer to the new building. And so the old school was consigned to dereliction though it was to be the mid 1970s before it was finally demolished.