Review by John Cooney
This miscellany of reminiscences by former Maynooth students and teachers is a diarist’s delight. Consisting of recollections by 90 contributors over 512 pages – and covering more than a half century of rapid social change – this handsome production, replete with photographs of a historic campus in the heart of Kildare’s university town, celebrates the college’s 225th birthday. It ranks as a twin companion to the acclaimed but already dated 1995 bicentennial tome, Maynooth College 1795-1995, by Monsignor Patrick Corish.
According to editors, Salvador Ryan and John-Paul Sheridan, the title derives from the classic, “I Remember Maynooth”, by Neil Kevin, first published in 1937 and updated in 1945 to mark Maynooth’s 150th anniversary. Famously, Father Kevin, professor of English, wrote that as Maynooth College began to be old, it became noticeable that, with institutions as with individuals, a sign of age is a failing memory.
“Already clues are missing”, explain Ryan and Sheridan, “and when conversation turns to reminiscence, there are doubts and gaps ….. what is lacking to us is not a historian, but a diarist who would have written for us between the lines of history – and not one diarist, but a sequence of them.”
This mélange of recollections trip gaily through Maynooth’s complex changing phases, first, as a national seminary created by an English Protestant Government intent on enticing students traditionally trained for the popish priesthood on the European continent away from the secularisation snares of the French Revolution; to recognition as a theology-conferring Pontifical University in 1896 by Pope Leo XIII; to becoming in 1910 a recognised constituent college of the National University of Ireland extending to degrees in arts and science; to the admission of lay students including women in 1966, leading to its current status since 1977 as Maynooth University, more commonly known as the National University of Ireland.
In a short notice, a selection of snippets risks squeaking “the remembrancers” but a random grouping gives a flavour of the brew liberally dispensed by the Jesuit-owned Messenger publications so associated with devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus!
A first round of readings would peruse Monsignor Brendan Devlin’s difficulties in founding a French Department circa 1963, and Mary O’Rourke’s access to adult education evening classes in 1967 for an HDipEd to add to her arts degree secured at UCD a decade earlier before she married. This additional qualification was to direct her transition from De Valera’s domestic kitchen in Athlone to the hurly burly of Dáil Éireann and her status today as the doyenne of television and radio chat-shows.
With choral music so essential to the fabric of Maynooth’s Pugin chapel, renowned organ recitalist, Gerard Gillen, recalls conducting a musical ensemble featuring a young unknown college cantor and accomplished trombonist from Derry, Eamon Martin, now Archbishop of Armagh. This musical interlude is a cue for the late Fr James Good’s account to Penelope Woods of two concerts in the college’s Aula Maxima during De Valera’s “dreary Eden performances in the Emergency early 1940’s by the Quatre Belges Ensemble and by the world-famous Hungarian violinist, Jelly d’Arányi. These were arranged by College President, Monsignor Edward Kissane.
On the literary and film front, Fr Michael Conway, of Killala diocese, pays homage to Fr Peter Connolly’s campaign against censorship in the 1960s and, tellingly, quotes his professor of English’s prediction about a non-sentimental streak in the Irish temperament:
“See how quickly they abandoned the Gaelic language in the early
19th century when they saw it was of no practical use. Religion will
go in the next generation when it goes it will go so fast that nobody
will even know it is happening.”
The birth-pangs, of such seismic change are captured, literally-speaking, in Monaghan-born writer, Evelyn Conlon’s recollection of her arrival in Maynooth in 1976 with a five-month old baby to study for a B.A.
The prize for nostalgia goes to Canon Patrick Comerford, on whom a BD degree was conferred by Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, Chancellor of the Pontifical University, on a sunny mid-November day in 1987. Comerford, then an Irish Times journalist, was primed by photographer Eddie Kelly for a photograph to appear in next day’s newspaper with the Armagh cardinal. Comerford chuckles at how the congenial Kelly is best remembered for his off-camera mischance at the 1977 funeral of Belfast man, Cardinal William Conway, in Armagh : “a gust of wind carried Eddie’s hat into the grave along with the cardinal,” he recalls.
In a pivotal contribution to an understanding of Maynooth’s mixture of the divine and the secularity, Peter O’Reilly attributes an insight to Ronan Drury, the late editor of “The Furrow” during the messy High Court case in 1977 taken by laicised ex-priests, P.J. McGrath and Malachy O’Rourke. This was when “the clerical soutane gave way to the previously banned jeans.” The judiciary’s ruling against McGrath and O’Rourke was – “the greatest rattling of Old Maynooth”, according to O’Reilly, now parish priest in Enniskillen.
An unfortunate but serious omission is any re-enactment of how in the expansionist heady days after the reformist Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 news conferences at the end of plenary meetings of the Hierarchy became the arena for tense tussles between bishops and a more probing generation of religious affairs correspondents. These events invariably turned into gladiatorial spilling of episcopal blood after the Bishop Eamonn Casey revelations in 1992 and the subsequent exposures – and cover-ups – of clerical paedophilia.
Perhaps The Messenge will make amends for this unfortunate oversight by commissioning a companion volume by religious affairs correspondents and “wounded” clerics such as Cardinal Sean Brady and Bishop Brendan Comiskey of these dark days which are not even hinted at in this enchanting and entertaining Maynooth miscellany.
We Remember Maynooth, A College Across Four Centuries, Dublin, Messenger Publications, 2020. Price 50 euro
- John Cooney, a former Religious Affairs and Political Correspondent of the Irish Times is the author of John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland and is preparing a biography of Cardinal Tomás ÓFiaich, Ireland’s Lost Peacemaker.