Jim O’Brien

Takes a trip down memory lane

LAST week on my travels I found myself with an hour or more to spare between visits to properties. It was a fine day, my youngest daughter was with me and our journey was taking us to within sight of the spire of my alma mater, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

A trip down a memory lane speckled with sunshine and shadows was too tempting to pass. I turned the car towards the place that saw the youth of me come and go, to show my daughter where her father, and later her mother, faced the mysteries of life that loom large before you when you are all of 17.

A potted history of the college and its surrounds poured out of me as we approached the gate. My captive audience of one was treated to short bursts of loose facts about the Geraldine Castle located just outside the grounds from where the FitzGeralds of Kildare lorded it over much of the country.

Inside the gate, I spotted the ancient yew tree, under which Silken Thomas is reputed to have disported himself in his finery. Moving on we passed Stoyte House, the original building granted by His Majesty’s Government to the Catholic Hierarchy in 1795 so that priests could be educated in Ireland under the watchful eye of the Crown.

The British were desperate to staunch the flow of troublesome young clerics disembarking surreptitiously from French schooners with heads full of revolutionary ideas, the kind that caused a Bourbon head to fall into a blood-soaked basket.

Entering St Joseph’s Square any words I said were lost on my young sapling whose breath was taken by the sight of Pugin’s neo-Gothic masterpiece that rose before us on its imposing site.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Isn’t it beautiful,” I said.

“It is, Daddy, it’s like Hogwarts for Catholics.” Sweet and tender Mother of Divine God, was I wasting my sweetness on the desert air? But who am I to determine the prism through which anyone views the world or absorbs history?

I suppose, like Harry Potter, Maynooth was my Hogwarts, where the magic of youth sought to dance under the black cloak of a fraying solemnity. Ambling the familiar corridors with my child, we gazed quietly on the lines of photographs hanging on the walls, preserving my likes in unblemished and unlined eternity.

To my disappointment, the College Chapel was locked. I took a chance that an old friend on the staff might be in residence, and dialled his number. He appeared immediately in all his whiteness, the flour of the years sprinkled on him, and he now a professor in shirt and jeans. There are no academic gowns anymore.

This lovely Kerryman, who walked under these arches with me in 1975, doesn’t need any gown to carry his erudition, or a mortar board to tell the world he speaks at least five languages fluently, and knows things about things that were buried for millennia in the depths of the Dead Sea.

He delighted me, he delighted my daughter and she delighted him. Swiping his card, he took us to the magnificence of the College Chapel with its 500 carved choir stalls, its Italian marble altarpieces and its ornate plasterwork wrapped in Victorian splendour.

There was a time these stalls were full — full of young be-robed students whose voices filled the sumptuous arched ceiling with tantums and kyries and glorias. But for the clip of heels on terracotta the place is silent now; the decades of a dark theocracy have emptied its stalls as young men choose other paths, while young women have but limited space in these places.

We retired for coffee to the high-ceilinged refectory with its Tudor-like beams and crisscross diamond window panes. My friend and my daughter talked about school and holidays and Harry Potter. I was lost among the ghosts that glide around me, forever 17.

Rejoining the conversation, we squeezed as much as we could into our last few moments before I left. We talked of his mother in Kerry, Trump, the Pope’s visit and the state of everything now that Garret’s constitutional crusade has been embraced by a different Ireland.

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN THESE CHOIR STALLS WERE FULL, BUT THE PLACE IS SILENT NOW. DECADES OF DARK THEOCRACY HAVE EMPTIED ITS STALLS AS YOUNG MEN CHOOSE OTHER PATHS, WHILE YOUNG WOMEN HAVE BUT LIMITED SPACE IN THESE PLACES.

Making our way out under the arches we met two of his students, young women in the last phases of PhDs and Masters in theology, women whose voices and learning will hopefully speak for my daughters, and indeed for all of us, in places where exclusion is arrayed in the flimsiest of theological rags.

It was time to get back on the road, to leave this oasis of memory and these moments of unexpected delight. We parted under Silken Thomas’s tree where we too, like the colourful Geraldine, once disported ourselves in all our youthful finery.

My friend shook my daughter’s hand and told her to mind me. He turned and we embraced warmly, a gesture that would have raised eyebrows and dug furrows in foreheads were we to do such a thing back in the day when we first came through those gates.

We promised to keep in touch. We’ ll meet in the Kingdom, the real one.

In the week or two since our visit to the plains of Kildare, my daughter and I have chatted about what we saw and heard, and in my heart I have savoured the delight of the sojourn.

In contrast there was no delight to be found in the reaction of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin to Josepha Madigan’s leading of a liturgical service and her subsequent comments about women priests. As my daughter might say, “It was mean, Daddy.”