St Patrick’s Training College

St Patrick’s Training College was a Vincentian-run teacher-training institution whose strict religious routine and disciplinary rules made it a small-scale expression of the church-dominated order of mid-century Ireland. John McGahern found its control of students’ time and conduct oppressive, but its thin curriculum also gave him space to develop a private intellectual life: the books he read and discussed there helped sustain a vocation beyond teaching.

Purpose and intake

The college drew students aged seventeen to twenty, alongside a few older university graduates. Some places were reserved for native Irish speakers from Gaeltacht areas, who had come through preparatory colleges where instruction was entirely in Irish. Most entrants through open competition had already won, or could have won, university scholarships—an indication of the academic ability brought into the institution, if not of the education it would provide.

For McGahern, entry marked a passage into one of the institutions at the centre of the official Ireland closely connected with Church and State. His father, Francis (Frank) McGahern, secured time away from the barracks and drove him to the college door. He would have liked to inspect the premises and meet the dean and president, but was not allowed to do so. The episode places the college’s authority in view even before McGahern began his training: access and oversight belonged to the institution, not to the family accompanying a new student.

A timetable of supervision

The college regulated movement with unusual severity for a third-level institution. Students could leave only on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and for the whole of Sunday, and even then had to return for meals and Evening Devotions. They had to be inside the walls before the gates closed at ten. A student who arrived late had to pass through the president’s house and offer a plausible explanation; repeated lateness could mean expulsion. Leaving the grounds was therefore not simply a matter of personal choice, but an action monitored through gates, schedules, explanations, and the prospect of exclusion.

A story McGahern recalls makes that system tangible. A student returning late from a dance tried to scale the high wall rather than enter through the president’s house. Unwilling to risk his good trousers on the curved barbed wire, he threw them over the wall and climbed after them, only to be caught in the dean’s flashlight. The boy apologized as he collected his trousers, but Father Johnston, known as The Bat, answered that it would not happen again. By morning the student had gone. The anecdote turns a rule into a scene of exposure and removal: a breach of curfew was answered not with a modest penalty but with disappearance from the college.

Attendance at daily Mass and evening Devotions was compulsory. Religious commitment was also organized through societies: there were several religious groups, but no historical, literary, philosophical, or Gaelic society. Not belonging to at least one religious society was dangerous. The college thus gave institutional priority to demonstrable conformity in devotional life, while providing few formal settings for intellectual or cultural activity outside religion.

Education and the private vocation

McGahern judged that the college gave its students little education. The imbalance between entry and exit standards sharpened that judgment: up to 90 per cent was required for admission, but only 40 per cent to pass out, and a teacher’s status was the same whether the final mark was 90 or 40. The courses could, he found, be safely set aside until a few weeks before examinations. The institution’s governing concern was not the development of students’ education, aesthetic sense, or moral judgment, but their willingness to conform.

Students were being prepared as subordinate assistants to priests in parish life, with education itself placed below priestly authority. McGahern’s account presents this as an organizational purpose rather than merely a defect of teaching: trainees were to become cogs in a wheel, secondary to the priest in all things. Yet the looseness of the academic demands created an opening. He learned from other students, continued reading for pleasure, and took part in clandestine exchanges in which books were discussed and passed around. His education depended less on the official courses than on informal contact with fellow students and on reading that continued to change his sense of possibility.

The college’s threat of expulsion condensed its disciplinary outlook into a recurring warning: “Ni beidh sibh arais” (ye won’t be back). At the end of each year, four or six students were not back. McGahern, accustomed to the freedom and open ways of Carrick-on-Shannon, found the institution barbaric; students who had come through diocesan seminaries, by contrast, could regard it as blissful. That difference in perspective shows how the same rules could feel either like a refuge or an imposition, depending on the institutions and freedoms students had known before arriving.

Religion, authority, and the college’s legacy

McGahern’s criticism of the college sits beside a more complex account of religious life. He had experienced church ceremony as beauty, mystery, and a source of meaning; in his account, the Church could represent an authority beyond his father’s violence and household rule. At St Patrick’s, however, religious practice was also compulsory and embedded in a system that trained future teachers to serve parish authority. The distinction is not between religion and its absence, but between spiritual experience and its institutional use to direct conduct.

The college’s calendar also intersected with McGahern’s departure from Ireland. When it closed for the summer in 1954, his father remarried, and McGahern took a boat to England to seek work. That movement followed a period of training within a tightly bounded institution, but led away from its walls and toward a different life. The college did not determine that choice; its timetable nevertheless forms part of the chronology through which the transition takes place.

Its influence can also be seen in the later experiences of former trainees. After McGahern’s dismissal from teaching, men trained at St Patrick’s wrote to him from Birmingham, Glasgow, and Newcastle. They described being sacked after falling foul of a bishop or priest, or infringing Catholic doctrine, and having no recourse but to disappear into Britain. McGahern recognized in their accounts a later version of the college’s warning that some would not return. The institution therefore appears not only as the setting of his own training, but as one part of a wider system in which religious authority could shape teachers’ employment and limit their ability to remain in Ireland.