ST. NICHOLAS’ PAROCHIAL SCHOOL

by Tom Kenny

This Church of Ireland School is situated in Waterside beside the courthouse and the Town Hall. The earliest existing school records date back to 1901 to the Model School which was situated on Upper Newcastle Road. It had opened in 1852 with 400 pupils, many of whom were Catholics. This proved too much for the then catholic bishop who set out to make way for explicitly catholic education in Galway. He invited the Mercy Sisters and the Patrician Brothers to set up schools here and made it a ‘reserved sin’ for catholic parents to send their children to the Model School. This resulted in 199 pupils withdrawing and meant the end of multi-denominational education in the city.

The Model school went into decline and it eventually closed down in 1926 and all the pupils transferred to Buckland Buildings on Waterside where St. Nicholas’ Parochial School opened on July 1^st of that year. The building had been constructed in 1835 by the Protestant Nautical Society and the inaugural address was given by a distinguished naturalist named Frank Buckland. The lecture was so successful that it was proposed that the Society’s rooms would be renamed Buckland Buildings. They were leased in 1892 to Henry Persse of Glenard, Richard Biggs of the Grammar School and Rev. Fleetwood Berry, rector of St. Nicholas’ Church.

The British Army detained a number of nationalists in the Town Hall in 1821 but conditions there were appalling thanks to overcrowding and when two of the prisoners died, there was a huge public outcry, so the Army ‘hastily took over’ Buckland Buildings and many of the prisoners were held there from January to April, 1922. The buildings were inspected when they left and a list of items missing or damaged was drawn up, so a cheque for £122-9s – 6d was handed over. More damage was discovered later and a further cheque for £100 was issued.

The first headmistress of the Parochial School was a Miss O’Brien who taught there until the arrival of Miss Aiken in 1931. Miss Aiken was remembered by some of her pupils as “fair, firm and slow to anger”. A Miss Laura Smith Moffett, a teacher in the school wrote a letter to the authorities saying “This school is like a morgue from the outside and inside, it is like a junk shop …. The light of day can barely get through the dirty windows so that the children usually have to work by artificial light. The children were bitterly cold during the months of January and February and could, with difficulty, hold their pencils”.

In 1955, there were eleven boys and thirteen girls in the school and the teacher’s salary was £40 per month. Miss Aiken continued to teach there until her retirement in 1960. She was succeeded by Miss Hilda Clinton, who in turn, was replaced by Miss Iris Lyons.

In 1965, the school was demolished and a new building erected. While the reconstruction was going on, the pupils were accommodated in a building across the square owned by the Mercy Nuns and later occupied by Maurice Semple.  In September, 1977, there was a complete change of staff with the departure of Miss Lyons and Miss Simpson and the arrival of Miss Alice Beasley and Mr. Leslie Lyons. Numbers were growing so Mrs. Patricia McNamara was appointed as an assistant. Having three teachers necessitated the use of the parochial hall as a classroom which meant that the school furniture had to be removed every afternoon so that the hall could be used for other activities.

By 1984, the numbers had increased to the extent that there was serious overcrowding so plans were drawn up for three class extensions. While this construction was going on the entire school moved to prefabricated buildings provided by Coláisde Iognáid on Sea Road. The new classrooms opened on January 14^th, 1985. In 2001, a storeroom was converted into a classroom for special needs pupils.

Since then, the school has educated pupils of many different nationalities, different religions and children of non-religious backgrounds and while there is this history of religious and ethnic diversity, this wonderful institution plays a hugely important part in the life of the Church of Ireland in Galway and its surroundings. Today, the school is full of light and is warm and welcoming.

Our first photograph is of the original Buckland Buildings taken c.1950. Our second image is of 25 pupils taken with Miss Aiken c.1957.They are, back row, left to right; Sheelagh Harris, Sylvia Miller, Robert Hill, ---- , Denis Barnett, David Harris, John Coy, Ken Park, Raymond Stewart, Gerry Barnett, ----- , Lucy Fretwell. In front are Kenneth Abernathy, ------- . Pat Coughlan, Joyce Abernathy, Carol Stewart, Clodagh Cooke, ------- , --------, Marion Coy, Ann Coughlan, Gillian Anderson, Brian Park, Frank Kermode. The photograph was taken at the back door to the playground. The window on the right was the boy’s cloakroom, the one on the left was that of a bedroom for the house.