Speech by John Bruton, President of the Clongowes Union, at the Union s Annual Dinner in the Ballsbridge Hotel on 20 February 2015 at 8.

Transcription

1 Speech by John Bruton, President of the Clongowes Union, at the Union s Annual Dinner in the Ballsbridge Hotel on 20 February 2015 at 8.30pm CLONGOWES 1814 It is indeed a very great honour to speak here, as President of the Union, 200 years after the school itself was founded. Apart from our guests, everyone here has vivid memories of the school. On all our parts, I wish to thank the Jesuit Order for what they have done for us. Particularly, I wish to thank Fr Leonard Maloney SJ, who retires this year as Headmaster, for his great leadership in the school. I thank him for his courage, his conviction, and his personal kindness. To have been at school in Clongowes is to be part of an extended family, a family you can turn your back on if you like, but which is still there, when you change your mind. Part of the role of family is helping family members who fall on difficult times. The Clongowes Union Benevolent Association (CUBA) performs that role and I hope you will generously support the envelope collection for them tonight. What was life like when Clongowes was founded long years ago in 1814? 1814, in Ireland, was the last year of a long war, dating from 1790 and sparked by the French Revolution, in which this country had been intimately involved. A rebellion in 1798, the Act of Union, and an undelivered promise of Catholic Emancipation were all outgrowths of that conflict, as was the participation of Irish soldiers in Wellington s victory at Waterloo in 1815.

2 40% of Wellington s British army were Irish, as he was himself, although he was loath to admit it. Ireland s economy had boomed during the war up to 1814, as it did again during the First World War. But, once the war ended, the demand for Irish exports of woollen and cotton goods fell, as, with the blockade ended, new competitors were able to enter its markets. Bank failures were endemic in those years. Agricultural prices collapsed, and evictions were made easier by a law passed in So, as Clongowes was founded, the country was heading into one of its periodic economic downturns. The average rent was 4 per acre, so the annual rent of 15 acres of land would cover the 50 guinea fee to send a boy to Clongowes for a year. Two years after the first boy entered Clongowes, in , there was famine across Europe - a year without a summer- because of the environmental consequences of a major volcanic eruption in Indonesia, which caused an ash cloud across the northern hemisphere. Clongowes students, entering the school in 1814, would have aspired to careers in the professions - especially law, which was now open to Catholics. But Catholics could not become a Senior Counsel, or an MP, until The month before the school was founded, the Catholic Board had been suppressed by vice regal proclamation. To found the school, the Jesuits were required to get a licence from the Church of Ireland Bishop. They did not apply, but went ahead any way...natural risk takers even then. I learned that the current Church of Ireland Bishop, Patricia Storey, visited the school recently, so I presume she has given her permission retrospectively. Illiteracy was still very high in Ireland in 1814, though many poor people paid small sums for their children to learn to read and write in pay schools - otherwise known as hedge schools.

3 Education was a denominational battleground, with bible societies opening free schools for the poor, in the hope of making conversions. So education, at the time of the founding of Clongowes, would have been a priority for the Catholic Church. Religious practice was high in Dublin and Leinster, which had a reasonable infrastructure of churches and clergy. In contrast, in the west of Ireland, where the population density was higher, and people had less money to spare after putting food on the table, the church infrastructure, the number of priests, and educational provision, was much less. Illiteracy was thus still over 80% in Mayo in 1841, as against under 40% in Kildare(better than the European average). In Kildare, parents had enough to spare to send their children to a pay school, to contribute to the clergy and to church building. In Mayo, they did not. Money made a difference, then as now. But it is important to stress that the motive of the Jesuit Fathers coming here 200 years ago was not primarily political, economic, or even educational. The primary goal was religious...eternal not temporal...aeterna non caduca... The Jesuit order itself had only just been unbanned by the Pope.

4 They were banned in 1773 and unbanned in Their goal in setting up Clongowes was to bring the faith to a young generation of people who, through their example, would bring it to others. The goals of Jesuit education were clear then, as they are now...to assure each person that he or she is known and loved by God, to help its students understand that, and to make life s decisions from the perspective of others, particularly of the poor. The imparting of a value system, like that, based on something more lasting than the span of one s own human life, is part of the argument for denominational education, part of the argument for having schools like many of those represented here. Education is about more than learning a lot of facts. It is about learning how to live, and how to make judgements. Anyone who sets out to educate children, and prepare them for life, and for making good judgements, has to start with a belief of what constitutes a good life, and good judgement. So it follows that teachers need to believe what they are teaching, and that schools should, as far as possible, to have a shared belief system. That, in a nutshell, is the case for denominational schools. If it was necessary that schools played a part in religious education in 1814, it is even more so today.

5 If religious education was removed from schools altogether, as some wish, that would deny many children of the opportunity to learn their faith at all, and would place religious education in less qualified hands. Indeed, today, with both parents working in most cases, working even longer and even more tiring days than their children, and children themselves with very busy 7 day week lives, it is hard to avoid religious formation being something that schools have to perform... if it is to happen at all. Realistically, how else is a complex and demanding belief system, like the Christian faith, to be conveyed intelligently to young people, if not at school? The French and American models of separating religious education from formal schooling are not exactly reassuring in their results. As GK Chesterton supposedly remarked, once men stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing. They start to believe in anything! The Jesuits, who came to Clongowes in 1814, had, I have read, been educated in Sicily and other European countries, and brought with them a continental, even a global, perspective, to the education of young Irish Catholic boys in Clongowes. That was also true of schools, founded later by other orders, like Castleknock by the Vincentians and Blackrock by the Spiritans. In Castleknock and Blackrock, the influence was French, because thats where the founders had been trained, in Clongowes it was Sicilian! 1814, when Clongowes was founded, was in other respects a notable year.

6 France was defeated by the Allies, and Napoleon had to abdicate for the first time. British forces were defeated at Baltimore in Maryland, an event celebrated in the Star Spangled Banner The Apprentice Boys were founded in Derry. The Chief Secretary of Ireland, Robert Peel, established what, perhaps, was the world s first professional police force, with promotion based on merit, not birth The Royal Dublin Society bought Leinster House...the run bull shows and the like, in that suitably rural setting! There was a major fraud in the London Stock Exchange, The Great Beer flood took place in London, when hundreds of thousands of gallons of beer escaped from a vat and drowned two people... In some respects, the year 1814, inaugurated a new European order. The Allied victory in 1814, confirmed a year later at Waterloo, brought into being, at the Congress of Vienna, a conservative inter state system, based on the careful maintenance of a balance of power. The Revolutionary era, in which France sought to remake Europe by force, was thus ended. Europe settled into a period of relative peace, and of small, fairly contained, wars...and era that lasted exactly 100 years, until That was 200 years ago. Will a school like Clongowes exist 100 years from now? Will there be a Jesuit order 200 years from now? It is not predetermined. The answer to that depends on brave, and probably very unfashionable, decisions young men may, or may not, make now, and in years to come.