‘Nobody Will Even Remember It’: An Oral History of the Contribution of the Teaching Religious in Ireland (I)

'Nobody Will Even Remember It': An Oral History of the Contribution of the Teaching Religious in Ireland (I)* Brendan Walsh Background This article seeks to review the contribution of teaching religious (sisters, priests and brothers) to schooling in Ireland between the 1940s and late 1970s, and principally employs the oral testimony of those who were taught by, and later taught with or as, members of religious congregations. Its purpose is to shed light upon the role of religious in teaching, their contribution to the development of the post-primary system in Ireland and the almost complete absence of women teaching religious in particular in Ireland's historical narratives. Beyond this, the article seeks to discover the influence religious brought to bear upon their pupils; the regard, or otherwise, in which those pupils held them; the extent to which they modelled critical intellectual rigour, their response to social changes in Ireland in the period under discussion and how they accommodated calls from lay teachers for greater professional mobility. The article employs the recollections of post-primary teachers, both lay and religious, who were taught by members of a religious order or by diocesan priests, while at secondary school in the period referred to. Its purpose is to add to the growing body of research concerning the contribution of religious and to offer suggestions about what, if any, legacy might be ascribed to them. Male religious have been neglected and, like their female counterparts, studies have tended to take the form of congregational histories or histories of 'individual educational establishments conducted by them'.1 Indeed, as Deirdre Raftery argues, generally, '(i)n the Irish context, little has been done on teachers' lives' while the 'work of religious orders involved in teaching has tended away from…the experiences of religious as educators', an absence that represents a significant omission.2 Traditional narratives have tended to concentrate upon the role of the Catholic church in relation to Studies • volume 110 • number 437 92 school ownership, management and ethos.3 Again, as Raftery notes, not alone is the history of teaching undeveloped in Ireland, but that of the teaching religious is all but absent. She cites Tom O'Donoghue, who notes that 'there has hardly been any research to provide insights into the lives of … religious … who were influenced by discourses of "vocation" and "the giving of service"', as distinct from 'the "industrial" and "labour" perspectives which have influenced … existing studies'.4 The role of female religious as agents of social change, including as educators, has attracted welcome scholarly attention. Peckham Magray's 1998 work The Transforming Work of Nuns had noted that 'little analytical work has been done on the impact of these women'.5 Smith and Wicks's work on convent schooling in Canada and that of Hellinckx et al., highlighting the 'forgotten contribution of the teaching sisters' in Belgium, Raftery's 'The "mission" of nuns in female education in Ireland, c.1850–1950', Harford's 'Continuity and change in the perspectives of women religious in Ireland on themselves both as religious and as teachers in the years immediately prior to, and following, the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965)', are a partial representation of the evolving interest in women teaching religious. 6 Raftery notes that, '(b)ecause one of the consequences of the agency of nuns in education was increased provision of opportunities to females, it has been possible to associate their work with the aims of the organised women's education movement, and to see their spirit as feminist'.7 Such 'acts of inference' are 'justifiable', but, she cautions, 'it is equally important for scholars to account for the spirit of these teaching congregations by referring to their own explicitly stated aims'.8 Here, Raftery touches upon an important aspect in the historiography of the teaching religious. Because the notion of the social good underlies Catholic social teaching, motives and actions, beyond those strictly belonging to teaching, can easily be attributed to them. One religious, interviewed for this article, recalled that, when her order embraced the introduction of free education in 1966, a lay colleague, anxious about the possible enrolment of new, uncooperative pupils, remarked, 'you carry your cross, I don't...

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.