Greg DalyGreg Daly finds out about ambitious plans to mark the closure of a beloved historical school
In all the talk nowadays about school patronage and divestment, it can be all too easy to forget how local schools are often cherished local institutions, dependent from their very beginnings on local initiative and effort.
Portlaoise’s Stewart Quinn hasn’t forgotten this, and when he was approached earlier this year to help record a Christmas CD for the band and choir of the soon-to-be closed Sacred Heart school, he thought the school could be a bit more ambitious.
“I was originally asked to produce a Christmas CD involving the school band and choir,” he told The Irish Catholic. “This was recorded in February, but I thought the school was missing an opportunity to showcase what the school’s ethos was about – I thought that should be showcased, and not just a Christmas CD.”
Sacred Heart National School is closing down next year, moving from central Portlaoise to a new site just off the Stradbally Road, where it will amalgamate with two other schools from the town: Scoil Mhuire, which like Sacred Heart is run by the Presentation Sisters, and the Christian Brothers-run St Paul’s.
“I felt as it was the end of an era we should mark it as such,” says Stewart, explaining that having opened in 1824 – before Catholic emancipation – Sacred Heart is Laois’ oldest school run by a religious order.
Originally, he says, the local parish priest invited three Carlow-based Presentation Sisters, Srs Magdalen Breen, de Chantal Wilmerding and Angela Mooney, from Carlow to set up a convent and school in the town, then called Maryborough. A local businessman donated a house and land, he says, explaining that “the idea was that they’d educate poor kids in Portlaoise, as there was no facility for that at the time”.
“215 people turned up on the first day of the school,” he says, “which at that stage was in the basement of the convent!”
Keen to do more to preserve the school’s memory than produce a Christmas CD, Stewart says, “I presented the idea of a book including archive photos rather than just ones from just this year.”
In the end, they’ve produced a 36-page book, which has, Stewart says, “some really, really fantastic photos”. Many of these, he says, are from the Terry Redmond collection which he says is “synonymous with Portlaoise”, although he didn’t limit himself to those, including, among others, prints from the National Library’s Eason collection.
To show how things have changed, he says, “we also photographed a lot of same places from the same spots – it shows how quickly things can fall into disrepair if not looked after”.
“The current photos are mostly buildings as they are and the students themselves,” he continues, saying “the idea was to kind of capture the present. We approached it like a future history project – the Redmond photos are like what today’s photos will be like. This was our one chance to get it right.”
Stewart’s wife Ann-Marie took the current photos of “moments in the day summing up the essence of what the school is about”. Describing shots of teachers working closely with their students as “very fly on the wall, intimate, and right in amongst them”, he says “it almost gives you an opportunity to relive your old school days”.
The book will also include a contribution from students and teachers past and present, with poet, author and RTÉ presenter Pat Boran writing about how Portlaoise’s character will be effected by the departure of two schools from the town’s historical quarter.
It will also be accompanied by the CD that sparked the whole project. Recorded in February, the CD is, Stewart says, “made of Christmas songs and traditional Irish songs, attempting to capture the band as it is now in its 50th year”.
An aural journey
It will also feature nursery rhymes and old religious songs from the infant classes as well as a ‘Day In The Life’ piece which he describes as “an aural journey through the day with all the sounds of the school”.
“One of the school’s teachers,” he notes, “was in the original band in the 60s and 70s and is now band leader. She teaches music – recorder and violin.”
In working on the project, he says, he came across the sister who originally set up the school band and other impressive and much loved Presentation Sisters including Sr Anne Keating, who had been the school’s principal when he was a boy at St Paul’s.
Meeting such figures, he says, “led to the idea of doing interviews with Presentation Sisters and current and former teachers”. The book, he explains, includes a code giving access to an exclusive dedicated YouTube channel where such audio-material can be found. This can keep being added to, he says, explaining that “it keeps it current, so it becomes a much broader project, looking into the history of the town and the kids there”.
The project will be officially launched at a presentation on December 1, when audio/visual segments will be interspersed between performances by the band and choir.
The event will be live broadcast by Midlands 103 and covered by Joe Little and others. Starting at the school, the event will then move to the nearby Ss Peter and Paul’s Church, with which the school has close ties.
A substantial number of sisters with links to the school will be there, Stewart says, explaining that the event will be open to anyone who attended Sacred Heart – “which is pretty much everyone over the age of 50 in the town” – all of whom will be invited to “look around the school for a last time as it will be gone come June”.
Given that Stewart himself never attended the school, his affection for the place might seem strange, but he says that he started school in St Paul’s when he moved from Dublin at the age of seven, the same age as his Sacred Heart-attending daughter.
“Though I tried, I couldn’t remember my junior days in school,” he says. “I hope my daughter will remember. Part of the idea behind this is that she could hang on to her memories – the building will probably be gone.
“I felt that once I put my child into the school I was part of the town for the first time,” he continues. “The teachers are so loving to the kids – it’s unspoken but so clear.
“We tend to look back fondly on our past, and sometime embellish and dream up our memories, but would be great to record this as a kind of time capsule how things really were.
“For all the faults we’ve had over the years, the teachers were always aspiring to the same thing in the vast majority of cases and sometimes that gets a little bits lost,” he says.
