St Dallan’s Primary School

St Dallan’s Primary School is the parish-linked setting for Cushla Lavery’s work as a primary teacher and for the novel’s close view of children growing up amid religious division and political violence. Its routines combine lessons, prayers, and school news, while the conduct of its headmaster and parish priest exposes how adult authority and communal prejudice enter the classroom.

Setting and Daily Routine

Cushla teaches P3 pupils, generally seven or eight years old. In her first two years she taught P1, where much of her time went to helping the youngest children in and out of the toilets. The school stands on parish land shared with the church and parochial house, placing religious authority physically close to school life.

The classroom has its own rhythm of work and ritual. Some teachers expect pupils to stand when they enter; Cushla prefers to slip into the room and listen to the children’s chatter. Davy McGeown sits in the front row beneath her attention, not because he is troublesome but because other pupils torment him. As the children practise for First Holy Communion, they join their hands and recite the Hail Mary. The familiar words come out slurred, more like a rehearsed communal refrain than carefully articulated speech.

Before lessons, the pupils have to take part in a daily news activity required by the headmaster, Bradley. He presents it as a way of making children aware of the world around them; Cushla feels that they already know too much. Davy is always the first to volunteer. On one occasion, he reports a bomb in Belfast, bringing the conflict outside the school directly into the classroom’s routine.

Religious and Disciplinary Authority

The school’s parish setting allows Father Slattery to move through the playground and corridors and enter classrooms without warning. Cushla has complained to Bradley that these visits unsettle the children, but Bradley’s response is that Slattery is the priest. The access gives Slattery a direct presence in school discipline as well as religious instruction: he delivers what the narrative presents as frightening catechism and intervenes when pupils are already being disciplined.

When Davy and another boy are left standing in opposite corners after a fight, Slattery arrives with Bradley. He calls them bad boys, while Davy looks to Cushla for help and the other pupil watches the leather strap protruding from Bradley’s pocket. Cushla turns toward Bradley in an appeal to stop what is happening, but he backs out of the room. The episode shows the limits of her authority within an institution where the headmaster and priest can reinforce one another’s power, while a child’s plea does not ensure protection.

Cushla’s distrust of Slattery also has a personal basis. When her father was in hospital and confused by morphine, Slattery prayed with him and then persuaded him to write a cheque for a colour television. That history shapes her response to the priest’s repeated, unannounced presence at school; her objection is not simply to religious instruction, but to the way clerical authority can intrude without adequate restraint.

Children, Community, and Prejudice

Davy’s vulnerability is known beyond the classroom. His name comes up at staff meetings, where Bradley’s view of the family is coloured by the fact that Davy’s mother is Protestant, although the children are being brought up Catholic. The school therefore reflects the sectarian assumptions of its wider community even as it is responsible for the children who bear their consequences. Cushla’s decision to seat Davy near her is a practical response to the teasing, but it also makes visible the difference between attending to a child’s immediate needs and judging his family by communal categories.

The school’s concern for children is uneven. Cushla makes two girls repeatedly write an ungrammatical line from a Disney film after they mock Davy while he is absent. Her response is a small act of discipline in defence of a pupil who is not there to answer for himself. At the same time, the scenes involving Slattery and Bradley show that adult intervention may expose children to further intimidation rather than shield them from it.

Language, Colleagues, and Narrative Role

Irish appears within Cushla’s teaching as a language she can bring into the classroom. In one lesson, she reads a prayer slowly from the blackboard, attending to its sounds; the children cheer, and she laughs and takes a bow. The moment contrasts with the school’s more coercive religious and disciplinary routines: here, shared words produce visible pleasure rather than fear. It also situates Cushla’s knowledge of Irish within her ordinary work, rather than only within the political arguments it provokes elsewhere in her life.

The staffroom supplies a quieter view of the school as a workplace. Gerry Devlin makes Cushla tea during a break, and she has begun to look forward to seeing him by the kettle. These small exchanges sit alongside the school’s larger burdens: the children carry news of bombings and local hostility into class, while Cushla’s responsibilities beyond school press against her working day. St Dallan’s Primary School thus connects domestic and community crises to institutional routines, showing a classroom where care is repeatedly needed but where the adults who hold authority do not always provide it.