Lasting bonds forged in Pat’s

The ‘umbyuloes’ – that was what we called them. It was a low, flat-roofed, long bike shed where lads would congregate in St Patrick’s College, kicking a football or hitting a handball or even smoking (that was allowed, believe it or not, for the older students when I started).

I often thought of that word. What did it mean and how was it even spelled? I figured it may have been Latin – I’ve never heard it since.

That was until last week when a fellow St Pat’s old boy now ensconced in Germany (we are everywhere) solved the puzzle – the word was ‘ambulatory’ and the dictionary definition is as follows: “A place for walking, especially an aisle around the apse or a cloister in a church or monastery.”

So, the ambulatory was obviously a throwback from the old seminary days – and that’s fitting. In my time in St Pat’s, the whole place was a sort of throwback.

I started in September, 1996. I had attended school in London, then three years in St Brigid’s NS in Redhills and, for sixth class when we were building a house and had to move for a while, St Enda’s NS in Scotshouse.

They were two tiny national schools and, as it turned out, I was the only boy from either enrolling in St Pat’s that year so I knew nobody and found the first few months tough. The place was massive, old, dark and daunting. Even the iconic iron front gates terrified me when I first started.

Apart from the modern ‘new wing’ (also called St Augustine’s wing, if I recall correctly) and the oldest part of the front, which contained the principal’s office, the boarder’s rooms, the general office, the priest’s ref and so on, the building itself was cold and decrepit and probably hadn’t changed much in decades.

In his book on his time in the school, Dr Liam McNiffe – who later became principal of the college – noted that “the rationale underlying the organisation of life for pupils, particularly boarders, in St Pat’s in the early 1970s can… trace some of its origins back to the middle ages. A new wave of monastic orders, such as the Cistercians and Augustinians, arrived in Ireland in the 12th/13th centuries.

“The monks’ day was organised around prayer, work and study.”

Liam further adds that even the architectural design of the place was influenced by medieval monasteries – dormitories, a chapel, the refectory, the infirmary were all terms still used.

So it was when I was there; yet, when you got used to it, there was a charm to the damp, steamed up and smelly classrooms, the shabby study hall with its supervisor on a raised podium, the red-tiled and green-tiled corridors, even the fairly squalid toilets.

Fr John McTiernan was the President – I always loved that it was ‘President’, not Principal, before that changed – when I started. A lot of the teaching staff were approaching retirement by then and had seen it all down through the decades. Corporal punishment was obviously banned but there was still a little bit of it on an ad hoc basis – and youngsters, and particularly their parents, didn’t seem to make too much of a fuss about it.

In my time, classes started at 9am. The late Tommy McCaul was our bus driver; we’d arrive at 8:15 or so and get collected at 4:30. There was a 20-minute break from 10:55, then lunch was from 12:30 until 1:35 – the bells would ring intermittently from 1:20, beckoning us in, sweaty and rowdy.

On a Monday morning, we’d traipse up to the office and buy our lunch ticket for the week - £10 for the week for three courses and a little carton of milk and there were always seconds. The food was great which, I’ve been told, was a complete contrast to earlier times when boarders were half-starved.

As Ray Dunne mentions in an evocative preface to The College Boys, “the relief of a dayboys’ sandwich” was a highlight.

That wasn’t the case in my time but other remnants of the past remained. There was a nun, Sr Rosarii, and there were several priests.

Fr Kevin Donohoe was young and good fun; he was in charge of the ref. Fr Gabriel Kelly, my neighbour at home, taught us history. Fr Tom McManus trained football teams and was always firm and fair.

Fr John Gilhooly taught maths and coached the handballers and had an incalculable influence on the lives of so many.

It is fashionable to bash the Catholic Church and much of that criticism is warranted but it’s important to remember the positive contribution so many of these individuals made. I can only speak for myself but in my experience from St Pat’s, these were great men.

The school, which produced countless nationally renowned players, pulsed with football but, strangely given all the talent that was there, the teams did not do well in my time (these two latter facts are unrelated, I swear).

In my first year, we studied 16 subjects – the idea was that we’d get a taste of everything and then specialise from second year on. So, we were let loose with chisels, T-squares, musical instruments; raw lads from Laragh and Loughduff and Redhills and such international hubs perfected their German accents.

At lunchtimes, we’d entertain ourselves. Aside from soccer or handball, there was a lot of walking done, round what was known as “the half” – but always clockwise. To walk the loop in an anti-clockwise direction was a sin worse than wearing white socks and risked total excommunication.

There was ‘the basements’, where lads could watch TV on busted couches and play table tennis and snooker. There was the farmyard, where some fellas went to ‘mitch’. The soccer courts and, in later years, what we called ‘the sand courts’, and that was about it.

For football training, we togged out in a room at the very bottom of the school. There were no showers. As far as I remember, there was no light – and if the door closed, plunging the place into darkness, an all out ‘mosh’ was inevitable. Wrestling, grappling, grabbing the nearest student in a headlock – these informal activities seemed, in hindsight, to take up a large percentage of the day.

Funny incidents were a daily occurrence. The place was like a gigantic improvisational comedy set, in fact, the audience – 600 teenage boys - giddy from the moment they walked up the avenue, or down the stairs. It could be anything – and I mean, anything. Someone might drop an apple, or cough in a funny way, or maybe something slightly unusual on the intercom would set it off. I don’t know how the teachers kept control.

There were urban myths, too, and little piseogs. If you had a pocket on your shirt, it wouldn’t last the day. There was a ghost, some said; I remember other boys swearing that when Mary Robinson visited, the smallest lad in the school had been secreted behind the broken old clock at the front of the building with instructions to move the minute hand 60 times an hour.

Was there bullying? Yes – there’s no point denying it. For some, it was a mean, horrible place.

“It was tough,” Paddy McGill, one of the strongmen on the 1972 Hogan Cup-winning team, told me once.

“My first two years in St Pat’s were savage. Imagine being a Coventry kid sent over to St Pat’s in 1966.”

That hadn’t changed in my time; some fellas got a raw deal and probably hated the place. I’m sure things are different now.

It could be, like all institutions, a cold and hard place and you learned to have your wits about you. But as the years went on, I found it loosened up a bit.

I have vivid memories of rock music blaring out from speakers at lunchtime, of young teachers not much older than we were enjoying the craic. After a few years there, if you acted like a grown-up, you were treated as such.

Most lads went on to third level education, often rooming with their former schoolmates. I remember in second year in college, walking through Drumcondra one sunny Spring morning when I bumped into Fr Gerard Alwill, who had been President in my later years there.

We stopped for a chat and soon enough, some other former student wandered past and he, too, stopped.

After about 15 minutes, there were four or five of us, catching up, fondly reminiscing. That, more than anything, was the great beauty of the place. It educated us – it taught us about life and sport and academics – but it formed a bond, too. We made friends for life.

On the 150th anniversary of the school, let’s hope that bond endures.