History of Our School - Part 1

Written by Seán Hallinan

History of Carnacon NS, Part 2

When trying to establish a history of Education in the general Carnacon / Burriscarra area one runs into surprising difficulties e.g. there are very little records of substance and current data protection regulations are prohibitive etc. It is best to start at the beginning with the Penal laws.

Penal Laws

Under the 1695 Education Act–Catholic parents could not establish schools or employ a Catholic to teach their children. If children were sent abroad for education there was a £100 fine and the child could not inherit any property in Ireland or England. This gave rise to the Hedge School system which became widespread during the 18th century in order to provide education for catholic children. These Schools were often at a sheltered area such as the sunny side of a big hedge in summertime. In winter huts, sheds or abandoned cabins were used. Pupils often brought two sods of turf for a fire in order to keep warm. A pupil often acted as a look out to make sure that the school was not discovered. Bingham at nearby Newbrook House was reputedly paying £5 for a priest's head and £2 – 10s for a teacher's head in penal times!

Penal Laws

Reconstructed Hedge School setting - Ireland Parents paid the schoolmaster, pennies usually weekly or by the month. Also he might be rewarded and sustained periodically with fowl, turf, butter and vegetables. If hedge school teachers were caught they could be imprisoned or banished from Ireland. There were no desks in hedge schools. There were no maps or blackboards or standard facilities as we know them today. Pupils used to write on slates held on their knees with slate pencils. Among the Hedge Schools locally was one at Baile na Cloiche (Ballinaglee) in which the teacher was Mr Murtagh. There was another Hedge School at Tollets Cross where Malone Engineering is currently situated.

The earliest reference I could find to a formal education venue locally was a reference to St Mary’s Church “ the chapel, a good cruciform building, erected in 1835 at an expense of £2000, and decorated with a painting of the crucifixion, is situated at Carnacon. A school of 60 boys and 20 girls is held in the chapel.”

By the early 1800s a gradual easing of the Penal laws had taken place and thanks to Daniel O Connell, the most significant measure was; the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, (Catholic Emancipation) which removed the most substantial restrictions on Roman Catholicism in
Ireland and the United Kingdom. And in 1831 primary education was established in Ireland. This meant that children no longer had to attend a local hedge school though many continued habitually to do so (the last documented Hedge School in Ireland was in 1892). A National Board of Education was set up and a national system of primary school education began in Ireland.

Early 1800's

The fine solid two story edifice (old School) which opened in the fall of 1849 was built to provide for the education of the children of the local tenants. The early roll books which were viewed some years ago contain a lot of information and make very interesting reading. The registers include pupils names, addresses, ages on commencing and finishing, destination on leaving, school attendance, analyses of ability and parents occupation e.g., labourer, shepherd, farmer, servant, weaver and indeed in some cases sadly, pauper!
Pupils came from far and wide to the School, Mayo Abbey, Newbrook, Ballyglass, Ballintubber, Clogher and Brownstown. Many of the children attended up to 18 or 19 years of age. Some had to leave early to help at home, emigrate to America or Australia or other locations with their families and strangely some to return again to the hedge School. Many of the surnames listed are regrettably no longer known in the region.

The First School

Those numbers are quite startling for the time and are a strong indicator of the quest for knowledge and the desire of people to have their children receive an Education. A local landlord Family, the Blake’s of Towerhill, one of the 14 Tribes of Galway, now stepped into the breech to provide the first purpose built school in the region. The Blake’s of Menlo Castle, County Galway, held the lands of Clonyne and Clooneen or Towerhill, Parish of Touaghty, Barony of Carra, County Mayo, from 1636.

First School

The Blakes resided at Towerhill

Amazingly the annual salary of a teacher in 1861 was £32. A female teacher’s salary scale was £12 per annum in 1851 rising by yearly increments of £2 per annum to £26 in 1860.

Visits to the school by Managers, members of the Blake family of Towerhill are duly recorded as are the visits of School Inspectors. A frequent complaint by Inspectors was the number of days the School was closed in lieu of race meetings at which the Moore and Blake families with their magnificent racehorses were highly proficient proponents.
The salaries of teachers and monitors are also recorded. Amazingly the annual salary of a teacher in 1861 was £32. A female teacher’s salary scale was £12 per annum in 1851 rising by yearly increments of £2 per annum to £26 in 1860. A monitor, i.e., a bright student: who had finished school and was teaching without formal training, received £5 to £6 per annum but had to commit to examinations. Teachers taught Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and on occasion a little Latin!

School Managers

Punishments

Often also pupils had their slates tied around their necks, and for every word of Irish spoken there was a mark put on the slate. Then the punishments were administered by the master or in some cases, their own parents!

Acquiring English was seen by many as an essential key to survival either at home or on the other side of the Irish Sea or the Atlantic Ocean. What is saddest about the practice is that while it was introduced by the English administration as part of the ongoing attempt to destroy the Irish language and culture, it was acquiesced to by large numbers of parents and teachers and other members of the community.

The painful truth is that Irish-speaking parents bowed to strong cultural and economic pressures (many derived from the English) in trying to prevent their own children from speaking Irish. They did this because they feared that their children would end up starving in the great cities of England or North America. They feared that if they didn’t have English they couldn’t get a job in an English-speaking environment.

They did not teach Irish. Sadly this led to the swift decline of the Irish language. “Bataí scóir” tally sticks were placed around the necks of children to “encourage” them to speak English. Any word spoken in Irish was punished. While the practice was mostly associated with the National School system that was founded in 1831 and in which English was the only language permitted, there are surprisingly references to it having been used also by masters at the scoil scairte, or hedge schools.

Frank Thornton NT– Burriscarra 1926 – 1957

Emigration

We can better understand this by comprehending the astronomical levels of emigration from Ireland for five or six generations over 130 years approx. The population of Ireland in 1831 was 8.2 million people. After the famine through death and emigration by 1870 it had declined to 5.4 million and unbelievably it further declined to a mere 2.8 million people by 1960! (NMI stats) The practice of the bata scóir died out by the late 1870s although by that
stage the process of Anglicisation had been deep rooted. It would take many more decades for patriots like Douglas Hyde, Fr. Peadar Ó Laoghaire, and Maurice Moore of Moorehall (Irish Classes were held there in the early 1900s) and other early activists of the Gaelic League to resuscitate the language and organise classes among a sympathetic section of the Irish people.

Emigration

History of Carnacon NS, Part 2