The school without a skyline
Freedom might begin between the ears, but it needs a place to run wild also, writes novelist Colum McCann —a former pupil of Clonkeen College — as the Christian Brothers prepare to sell more than seven acres of playing fields at the school to developers
IN the spring of 1981, I ran onto the pitch at Croke Park to play for Clonkeen College in a regional GAA final. Fifteen years old, I filled in, more or less, at left-half back. A thin rain fell on a couple of hundred people in the stands. We lost the game, but no matter, it still stands out as one of the formative moments of my schooling. To play at Croker. To trot out to the imagined roar of all the Hill 16 ghosts. To strike the muddy studs on the floor of the tunnel at half-time: the peculiar music that looks forward to the second chance.
On the sideline, stood Brother Gerard Kelly — a small, fiery man, huddled in a dark anorak, a furrow of grey hair over his brow. He shouted alongside the other teachers who had guided us to the regional final. There was something about Kelly that spoke to the proper instinct of what it meant to be taught, not in a pedantic way, but the sort of teaching which recognised that an afternoon at Croke Park might just be as profoundly formative as any of his intense Honours Maths or Geography classes. He walked up along the line, his hands clasped behind his back, talking to himself most of the time, giving out the occasional roar alongside the other teachers and coaches.
The whistle went — the score was four points to three — and Kelly waited for us on the sideline and shook our hands, one by one, before we walked down the tunnel. No matter that we had lost: something powerful had transpired that afternoon and much of it was apparent in the handshake of a lone Christian Brother who I saw later walking across the pitch, hands clasped behind his back.
There is no twist to the Brother Kelly story — no tragedy, no abuse, no false pretences. He was a teacher through and through. He was out again the very next day — in the hammering rain on the pitches at Clonkeen College where the soccer team was training — huddled, this time, under an umbrella, stalking up and down in his long black soutane, waiting for the sun to break out, a man of intensity and integrity, always, it seemed, in competition with the weather.
***** Clonkeen College is in competition with a weather of an altogether different variety these days. The Congregation of Christian Brothers has announced plans to sell off 7.5 of the 11 acres of playing fields at the back of the school in order for a developer to cash in upon a series of luxury developments.
The Christian Brothers owe €10m to the State under the redress scheme for survivors of historical abuse. The Brothers have decided to unload the land in order to relieve their debt.
This is not just a story about a suburban Dublin school fighting for a patch of grass. Nor is it just a simple condemnation of instiwander, tutional blindness or corporate greed. Nor is it just an examination of the shifting nature of our national identity and our willingness to price-tag the future and in the process, discount the past. Nor is it just another salvo of nostalgia for a gone time. It is all these things together, and it is also the point at which we recognise that these stories are complicated, but in essence they come down to real life human dilemmas, most importantly — as Brother Kelly would undoubtedly point out — the dilemmas of those who have not yet had a chance to walk out on the Clonkeen pitches, let alone have those pitches guide them to a Croke Park moment.
The late, great Irish novelist John McGahern suggested that the local is the universal with the walls taken down. Perhaps, as a corollary, we can also say that the visionary becomes myopic where the walls are built up.
Clonkeen College — founded in the mid-1960s — has become, over the decades, a paragon of what an Irish education could possibly be. It is a community school, well known for its academic rigour, free of charge and free, also, until recently, of rancour and controversy. The first Leaving Cert crew of 12 students graduated in 1972, and over the years the school grew to accommodate more than 500 students. It was a school well known for its active involvement in sports, and a philosophy that promoted the idea that a healthy body allowed a healthy mind: to be academic was to allow the mind to literally and figuratively. Over the years, many championships were won and lost, especially in soccer and GAA.
The school has thrived over the years. As the Christian Brother influence slowly waned, it was taken over by socially engaged teachers who had a powerful and active interest in the community. The students did well: they became artists, entrepreneurs, actors and — tellingly — teachers themselves.
At the heart of much of this was the sense of community, much of which was focused around the playing fields. They were the lungs of the school: an expanse of green in an area that was rapidly losing out to suburbia. The active imagination could stare out the window and at least there was a bit of grass to look at. In the early afternoon the fields would fill up with teams. Even the lunchtime smokers had a place to hide away.
A school is as much its possibility for escape as it is its ability to hold and engage its students. But also, in a very real sense, the ability to get away is important for the health of the students, not just in a purely physical sense but in a ethical sense also.
One of the reasons Ireland has done so well on the world stage is that we’ve had — at least since the 1950s — a fairly agile educational system that recognised you have to educate the heart, the head and the body too. Freedom might begin between the ears, but it needs a place to run wild also. It does no good to shrink wrap the mind.
It is reported that the Christian Brothers stand to make €18m from the sale. After paying the portion for the redress scheme, some of the excess money will go to looking after the elderly brothers and evangelical efforts abroad. But the idea of selling the land is poisoned with narrowness. Sell the problem. Take no ownership. Retreat. Disengage. Let the financiers negotiate. Let the developers profit from public land. Let the next generation figure it out. So what if the classroom has no skyline?
It’s not only the Brothers to blame here, of course, but the meek political reaction, and the public inability to properly challenge the increasing myopia of unbridled property development.
It’s a familiar and disconcerting story to anyone who has been in and around Ireland for the past 10 or 15 years. But this particular sale seems like an abandonment of a long-standing moral compass that goes to the essence of our educational history: the Christian Brothers have decided that the easiest way out is to simply sell whatever vision they, and others, once triumphed. The sale betrays the legacy of the Brother Kellys of the world. In doing so, the Brothers are abandoning the fundamental principles of almost 50 years of teaching, faith and experience. They are also abandoning the teachers who have worked so hard to hold the school together. But they are also abandoning a fundamental vision of what role education and health plays in the development of the national idea — in other words, the story of those who have yet to walk through the gates.
The playing pitches are not just playing pitches: they are also segues to other places and other times. Once built upon, they won’t come back.