Presentation College

Presentation College gave John McGahern an education that changed the direction of his life: from a thirteen-year-old who had already attended seven schools and faced the prospect of clerical work, he became a student drawn into literature, learning, and the possibility of university. Set in a former military barracks in Carrick-on-Shannon, the school joined academic opportunity to the practical rhythms of rural life, and McGahern remembered his years there with gratitude as the beginning of an adventure that never stopped.

Origins and Setting

Presentation College opened at a time when secondary schooling remained inaccessible to many. Carrick-on-Shannon had no secondary school for boys, while Mrs Lynch had established the mixed Rosary High School for boys and girls. The Church tried to have her school closed and brought in the Presentation Brothers, but the effort did not succeed; both schools prospered. Together with the Marist Convent for girls, the schools made education available in the town and its poorer hinterland to students beyond the wealthy and the academically exceptional.

The college occupied part of a building that had served as a British military barracks. The Brothers lived in one wing, while the school took up the other, on three floors. The former drilling square had become lawns, trees, and a sanded yard where pupils played soccer with a tennis ball. A handball alley and a large vegetable garden stood behind the school, and a high wall enclosed the grounds. The building’s former military purpose remained legible in its layout, even as its yard and rooms were put to the ordinary uses of schooling.

McGahern’s Entry and Daily Routine

In the evenings and at weekends in early summer 1948, Brother Damien cycled through the countryside looking for students for the new school. He persuaded McGahern’s father to let the boy sit the house-scholarship examination. McGahern won a half-scholarship and began at the college that September, cycling eight miles from the barracks to Carrick-on-Shannon. Some pupils came from the town; most, like him, travelled in from the countryside.

The school’s daily life accommodated that cycling routine. Pupils stacked their bicycles in a large downstairs room, where they ate sandwiches and drank bottles of milk during wet lunch hours. Punctures were a regular interruption: one or more boys could usually be found repairing an upturned bicycle in a corner. These practical details place the college within the reach of rural pupils, but they also register the effort required to attend it.

Teachers and Academic Possibility

Brother Placid succeeded Brother Damien as principal. A good footballer and an exceptional teacher, he was remembered for the humour, encouragement, or disapproval that glinted behind his thick spectacles, which he polished throughout the day with a white handkerchief. When McGahern’s exam results were especially good in his third year, Placid checked his attendance and found that he missed several weeks each spring and autumn. McGahern explained that those absences coincided with work on the bog and in the potato field. Placid warned that he might win a university scholarship in two years if he worked, but could not do so if he continued to miss substantial parts of the school year.

Placid carried that concern beyond the classroom. During the potato harvest, he cycled out on a bitterly cold evening to Coxhill, where McGahern was picking potatoes and his father was digging them. After chatting with them, he took McGahern’s father aside for a long conversation by the road. The account does not disclose what they said; it records the father’s slow return and long silence. The encounter followed Placid’s warning about attendance and university, placing the demands of education beside the labour that repeatedly pulled McGahern away from school.

Other teachers widened the school’s influence. Brother Francis, a blond, curly-haired teacher who blushed at sexual references, made mathematics exciting. Mr Mannion, a former army officer, lent McGahern his own volumes of Dickens and spoke with him about the books both in and outside school hours. Their attention made learning more than preparation for examinations: it gave him books, conversation, and teachers who treated intellectual curiosity as worth cultivating.

Intellectual Awakening and Significance

The English texts McGahern studied included Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Henry IV, Wordsworth’s Prelude and Tintern Abbey, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and Virgil’s Ode to Virgil. He learned much of this material by heart and chanted it aloud while cycling alone on the empty roads to and from school. He sometimes recited the Ordinary of the Mass as well; its words, newly memorized, were beginning to take on meaning through his study of Caesar, Virgil, Cicero, and Horace. The road between school and home became a place where formal lessons continued in solitude.

McGahern’s recollection marks Presentation College as the point at which the fear and drudgery he associated with school gave way to anticipation and intellectual pleasure. A year earlier, he had used all his determination to resist being put into a job as an accounts clerk and general factotum in a hardware store. At the college, the prospect of further study began to feel like a future he could hold in his own hands. He later described those years as a beginning: through the pleasures of the mind, he was learning to know and love the world, and he looked back on the Brothers’ teaching as a gift of tools, luck, privilege, and grace.