The history of National Schools on the Errismore Peninsula can be traced back to 1833 when the parish priest, Rev. Peter FitzMaurice, applied to the National Education Board for funds towards the construction of a school in the townland of Aillebrack. The National Education Board was set up by the government in 1831 to provide non-denominational education in Ireland. The National Board contributed to the construction and fitting-out of schools, and provided grants towards teachers’ salaries and textbooks. A district inspector was employed to visit the schools regularly, to ensure that the rules and regulations laid down by the National Board were upheld, that good teaching standards were maintained and that the roll and account books were kept in order.
Aillebrack is in the civil parish of Ballindoon and in the 1830s the population of the parish was almost exclusively Roman Catholic. A religious census taken in 1834 recorded a population of 5,661, of whom forty-nine were Protestants and the remainder Roman Catholics.
The first school at Aillebrack was expected to cater for the children of the entire peninsula; it would be 1884 before the National Board allocated funding for a school at Dunloughan. Down through the years, various spellings are ascribed to the townland in official records; Allbrack, Ailbrack, Aldbrack and Ardbrack to list but a few.
Annie Bartley, teacher in Aillebrack for almost three decades, pictured outside the school in 1951.
Rev. Peter FitzMaurice was appointed parish priest of the Union of Clifden in 1832, which included the parishes of Omey and Ballindoon. He would continue in that role until 1852. Twelve prominent men from the district, three of whom were Protestants and nine Roman Catholics, supported FitzMaurice’s application, which was among the earliest to emanate from North Connemara.
The National Board approved the application on 30 May 1833, but it would be a further two years before the school was opened. The school was vested in three Trustees, Rev. Peter FitzMaurice, P.P., Charles Carroll Roe and Mathias Maley. The Trustees were responsible for employing the teacher and for the general management of the school. Rev. FitzMaurice held the position of school manager.
The landlord, John Augustus O’Neill, had already granted a rent-free site for the school and a 100-year lease was signed with the Trustees on 12 January 1835. O’Neill, who resided at Bunowen Castle, was the proprietor of almost all of Errismore Peninsula; he owned 17 townlands covering 13,000 acres. The family, formerly named Geoghegan, had changed their name to O’Neill. Born a Protestant, John A. O’Neill would later convert to Catholicism and, along with his wife and sister-in-law, was confirmed by Archbishop John MacHale at St Mary’s Chapel, Clifden, in May 1839.
The children of the school, picture with Ms. Chrissie O’Toole and Mr. Paud Kennelly in the early 1970s.
The National Board contributed £60 towards the construction costs of the school, which was supplemented by a local contribution of £32.6.6d. The exact location of the schoolhouse is unknown. However, records indicate that the contractor was C. Carroll and that it was built of stone and mortar, with plastered interior walls and ceiling, and a slated roof. Externally the school measured 44 x 22 feet, with the internal dimensions of the single classroom being 35 x 18 feet. At the time of opening there were no regular desks or seats; the only seating provided was of stone. The school opened on 3 June 1835, with forty pupils on its rolls, six females and thirty-four males, and was given the number Roll 1323. Sadly, the registers and rolls books for this school, and subsequent schools at Aillebrack, were destroyed in a fire in 1940. Consequently, we do not know the names of the pupils attending, their age, nor the townlands they came from.
The 46-year-old teacher, John Prendergast, had no formal training, but did have testimonials from Rev. FitzMaurice, the landlord and from other influential parishioners. Early records show that Prendergast had been running a mixed, private, fee-paying school in Aillebrack since 1824, where he taught reading, writing, arithmetic and Roman Catholic catechism to about thirty pupils. Such schools were normally referred to as ‘Hedge School.’ The standard of education varied in these schools, and in remote districts like Errismore it was usually low. A second hedge school opened for a brief period in 1833 in the village of Ross. It later closed and does not appear in the official listing of schools published in 1835.
Commenting on the application for a grant towards the teacher’s salary, the district inspector reported that Prendergast was not of the best standard, but there had been some difficulty securing a teacher because of the low salary on offer. The Board approved a salary of £8 for Prendergast, the starting salary of a probationary teacher who had not yet attained a classification; fees contributed by the parents of the pupils would supplement this sum. All pupils attending the school were instructed in ‘moral and literary education’ for seven hours a day, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., five days a week. The National Board’s regulations allowed for religious instruction to be given at set times within the schoolhouse, but this must not interfere with the secular education and must be given by a person approved by the parents or pastors. As all the students at the school were Roman Catholic, they received religious instruction from the teacher for one hour each day after school hours.
The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, Dr John MacHale, was a strong opponent of the National Board’s non-denominational policy and under his influence the Catholic clergy of Connemara soon began to separate themselves from the National School system. Rev. FitzMaurice resigned as manager of Aillebrack School in 1836 and was replaced by the landlord, John A. O’Neill. Without the support of the priests, the parents seemed less inclined to send their children to school and pupil numbers began to decline.
Children of the school, pictured in c1951.
When the district inspector visited on 10 September 1836, he found that the school did not operate regularly, that there was no specified period set aside for religious instruction and that the free textbooks provided by the Board were not in evidence. The teacher, he reported, was not competent and he described the school as ‘a mere hedge school’. Following his visit on 8 June 1837, he complained that standards in the school were poor and that the school accounts were not being kept. Records show that in March 1840 seven females and nineteen males were in attendance and the manager at this time was Mathias Malley of Creggoduff. It would seem that the school ceased to function shortly after this. Education files at the National Archive state that all grants to Aillebrack School were cancelled from 31 March 1840. Attendance numbers at the school had fluctuated in the two years previous, frequently dropping to below thirty and therefore rendering the school ineligible for grants under the National Board’s regulations.
The Great Famine resulted in the death of many in the district and left the landlord O’Neill bankrupt. Subsequently he was forced to sell his estate in the Encumbered Estates Court in 1853. Valentine O’Connor Blake of Towerhill, Co Mayo, purchased the greater portion of the Bunowen Estate, 7,690 acres, including the townlands of Aillebrack and Doonloughan. Aillebrack school is recorded as ‘suspended’ in the 1850s and the roll is struck off on 4 April 1860; ‘the building and premises having, through neglect of the Trustees, fallen into ruins, portions of the walls alone remaining.’ Records indicate that Aillebrack would remain without a National School for almost three decades. A mixed National School was set up at Derrigimlagh in 1853, separate male and female schools replaced this in the 1860s, but this was some distance from Aillebrack.
The collapse of the National School at Aillebrack and the ongoing ravaging effects of the Great Famine provided an opportunity for the proselytising Society for Irish Church Missions, to establish one of its schools in the district. The society opened a mixed school at Bunowen Beg, although it is referred to in their literature as Aillebrack, and separate male and female schools and a mission colony were established at nearby Derrigimlagh in the early 1850s. The Bunowen Beg Mission School was located on the main road from Ballyconneely.
In keeping with the general practice of the society, food and clothing was offered to the children attending the school and religious instruction and scripture reading provided. The aggressive proselytising activities of the society would cause friction and division in the locality and leave parents torn between the need to feed and clothe their children and the consequences of sending them to a mission school that would alienate them from their Roman Catholic beliefs.
In 1866, partly to counteract the activities of the Bunowen Beg Mission School, the local Catholic curate, Rev. Richard Prendergast, set about establishing a school at the centre of the peninsula near Lough Aillebrack. However, to fund the school he needed to return to the National Board. On 21 June 1866, he submitted an application for aid towards payment of a teacher’s salary and free supply of books for 100 students. A sketch map indicating the location of the school was included with the application. The school is also marked on the Ordinance Survey map of the region. The maps indicate that there were no roads to this school. It is unlikely that this was the original schoolhouse; the measurements given (38 x 19 x 8 feet externally) would indicate that the building was smaller and it had a thatched roof, while the earlier school had a slated roof. The one-classroom schoolhouse was recorded as being ‘well and substantially built’ of stone and lime, with a dry mortar floor and a thatched roof. The classroom had a fireplace with a chimney and was well ventilated with four windows (measuring 3’ x 2’ 6”), and well supplied with ‘the necessary school furniture’, nine desks (8’ 2” long benches) and a book press. There was, however, no black board or clock, and no lavatories. The landlord Valentine O’Connor Blake had given the site rent-free.
Aillebrack Children in 1934.
The school had 123 pupils on the rolls (Roll 9716), when the district inspector, Alex Simpson, visited in August 1866. However, at sixty-three, the average daily attendance was only half that number. There were, according to Simpson, about sixty houses within a half-mile radius of the school and all children in the area were expected to attend. Bartley McDonough, appointed principal on 18 June 1866, was 17 years of age. Although he had not received any training, Simpson found him competent, of good character and promising in his ‘method of conducting School’. School fees of 1s 1d per year were paid to the manager, but a few students were admitted gratuitously ‘on the authority of the teacher’. McDonough’s current income was calculated on the school fees at roughly £8 per annum. The school was open five days a week, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Roman Catholic catechism was taught in the schoolhouse each day after school hours.
The district inspector reported favourably on Rev. Prendergast’s application:
In no place can a school be more required. The attendance will be very large, the teacher is a lad of considerable promise and the house is suited to the locality. I have therefore to recommend that salary be granted from the date of opening.
A sum of £15 was sanctioned to supplement Bart McDonagh’s salary from 1 July 1866, and free stock to the value of £1.10s (books for 100 pupils) was granted. Teaching assistants, referred to as monitors, were from time to time employed at the school, but not all received the support of the National Board. Over the following years, the various inspectors’ reports are a catalogue of breaches in regulations; teacher must not close the school on fair days in Clifden, ‘which is more than 8 miles away’, teacher admonished for not keeping up the rolls and reprimanded for the low performance of the pupils (1868). Three years after his appointment, Bart McDonagh left the school on 30 June 1869. He was replaced by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hilton on 1 August 1869. A teaching monitor Mathias Little, left on 30 March 1870.
The district inspector found the school closed on two occasions in 1871 when Lizzie Hilton was said to be ill. In 1873 she was ‘reprimanded severely for neglecting to mark rolls and for carelessness in keeping accounts.’ In June 1874, Hilton informed the manager that the school was frequently broken into and property either removed or destroyed and that the door was in bad repair and difficult to lock. In 1875, Hilton was fined £2 for her continued irregularities in her school accounts and was warned that should she again be found guilty of a similar offence, her name would be struck off the roll of National teachers. The warning would seem to have been ignored, because in 1876 and 1877, we find Hilton again being reprimanded for arrears in accounts and poor keeping of the rolls. Throughout this time, there is no comment on this teacher’s ability, her control of the classroom or the performance of her students, which would lead one to assume that all was in good order in that department. Lizzie Hilton left the school on 30 April 1879.
Extreme hardship was evident in Connemara in the late 1870s and early 1880s and perhaps even more so on the Errismore Peninsula. Three years of severe weather conditions had caused repeated crop failure and fuel scarcities, the fishery had failed and the kelp trade had collapsed. Throughout Connemara, tenants were behind in their rents and in debt to local shopkeepers. By 1879, the combined effect had brought many families to the brink of starvation and ruin, and totally dependent on charity to see them through.
In October 1879 the Land League was formed to campaign for tenant rights and to fight evictions. The landlord, Valentine O’Connor Blake, died in 1879 and was succeeded by his second son, Charles J. Blake. A number of evictions for non-payment of rent were carried out on the Bunowen Estate in the early 1880s. Many of the evicted tenants took advantage of the free emigration scheme being offered by the English Quaker James Hack Tuke and his supporters at this time, and sought out a new life for their families in Canada and America. Mr Tuke’s Free Emigration Scheme assisted over 3,000 from the Clifden Union, mostly in family groupings, to emigrate to the USA and Canada between the years 1882 and 1884. Some of these families were from the Errismore peninsula, a fact reflected in the 1891 census figures. The combined population figures for the townlands of Aillebrack, Emlagharan, Keerhaun South and Leaghcarrick dropped by a third in the years from 1881 to 1891. The 1891 census records attribute this decline to emigration.
Aillebrack NS, 1989.
Nonetheless, the number attending Aillebrack School was high, at times considered to be higher than the school could accommodate. In June 1880, 201 pupils were on the rolls. The principal was Mary Furdon and the teacher monitor was a Bridget Furdon, perhaps a relative. The school manager had taken on an assistant teacher, Mary Earner, aged 19 years, and applied to the board for assistance towards her salary. The district inspector, although finding Earner to be competent, declined the application on the grounds that the school could not accommodate the number of students attending.
According to the district inspector, the school could only comfortably accommodate fifty-four students, ‘allowing 8 sq. feet per student’, yet the average attendance was seventy, and there were 147 present when he visited on 18 June 1880. The high attendance on the day was put down to the fact that free food and clothing, funded by the charity the Mansion House Relief Fund, was being distributed at the school from April through to July. Student numbers were expected to fall once this ceased. Nonetheless, the district inspector warned that the cabin could not accommodate such large numbers and on that basis, he did not recommend that the application be granted. Miss Earner was, however, appointed as a temporary assistant teacher on 1 February 1881, but was dismissed as incompetent in September 1882. In the meantime, proficiency at the school was declared ‘very unsatisfactory’ by the district inspector and Mary Furdon resigned. However, steps were already underway to replace the existing school with a new larger schoolhouse and, on 31 March 1883, it was struck off and superseded by a new school, Roll 12103.
The construction costs for a new school at Aillebrack were estimated to be £459, with a further £60 estimated for an enclosure. On 15 February 1881, the National Board sanctioned a grant of £306.10s towards the school building and a further £40 towards an enclosure; the local community would provide the remainder. The landlord, Charles J. Blake, signed a sixty-one-year lease on 19 May 1881 for the site. The new school (Roll 12103) was located where the present school now stands. It could accommodate 150 pupils and the first principal, Patrick J. Mulleague, was appointed on 1 April 1883. The Board granted Mulleague, classified as a 2nd Class teacher, a salary of £35 per annum, with results fees. Delia M. Lydon was appointed monitor. The Board granted free stock to the value of £5, on condition that a sale stock at a value of £1.10s should be purchased.
Although the average attendance figures for the latter half of 1883 were in the 80s, and reached 107 in September, an application for funding for an assistant teacher was refused in December 1883: One month later, the National Board accepted Kate Dogherty as an assistant teacher; however, she was dismissed on 30 September 1884 having failed her exams. The number of pupils on the rolls in February 1884 was 137 and there were seventy-one present when the district inspector, Edmond Downing, visited on 19 February 1884. In 1885 it seems the management wanted to extend the building, but the Board refused the request as the school was built to accommodate 150 students and the average daily attendance was well below that number.
Children of Dunloughan NS, which closed in 1967, its pupils transferring to Aillebrack.
A member of the public, perhaps a parent, levied charges of ‘intemperance’ against Patrick Mulleague in 1887. On this occasion the charges were said to be ‘without foundation’. However, three years later, Mulleague’s imprudent behaviour would finally catch up with him. On 19 February 1890, Mulleague called on the district inspector at a neighbouring school and informed him that he had influenza and had closed his school. The inspector reported the incident to the National Board, stating that he ‘detected a strong odour of whiskey’ from Mulleague.
Later that year, 1890, a new principal, Patrick MacHale, was appointed. MacHale’s wife, Joanna MacHale, was employed as a work mistress at a salary of £12 per annum, with result fees for needlework. This position was subject to the number of female students attending the class being maintained at twenty or over and was suspended periodically when numbers dropped. The MacHales were the first to occupy the new teacher’s residence when it was built next to the school in 1898.
Primary Education in the Free State was the responsibility of the Department of Education, set up in June 1924. The Irish language was now included as one of the core subjects in the curriculum and grants were allocated for Irish courses for teachers to assist them in teaching the language. The records show that the school building was in need of repair in the early 1930s. The building was now fifty-years-old, the seating was said to be old and two teachers were working in the same room without a partition. A grant was sanctioned for improvements and steps were underway to extend the lease for a further fifty years. The Department of Education, however, seems to have reconsidered the decision to repair the school and instead suggested that it would be more economical for a new schoolhouse to be built.
Application forms for funding for a new school were issued to the manager on 24 November 1937. The records are silent on the progress regarding the erection of a new school. It seems likely that, as at Dunloughan School, funding for ongoing maintenance and promises of a new school in the future were all that was on offer. However, events would overtake procrastination when the school was burnt down on 3 December 1940. The destruction of the school was not considered an act of vandalism but was thought to have been accidental. The roll book for December was burned in the fire, but the new roll book, which is still in Aillebrack NS, states that the school was closed between the 7 and 14 January due to “Fáthanna eile”(Other reasons). At that time, the teachers in the school were Mrs. Alice Kennelly and Mrs. Annie Bartley and they speedily arranged that the children in the school would be transferred to Bunowen Castle after the school burned down. Robert Black, owner of the castle at the time, kindly agreed to the request. The children were taught in two rooms in the east wing of the castle, which they described as cold and draughty. Many of the children in the school today have grandparents who attended school in the castle, crossing the field barefoot to learn in the unique surroundings.
Eventually the new school was completed in 1945, opening on the 25 October that year to students. The old school was removed from the list of National Schools and all grants from the Department of Education were transferred to S.N. Naomh Cáillín, Roll 17488, Aillebrack’s fourth National school. Numbers ebbed and flowed; In 1953, there were thirty pupils in the junior room along, while by 1967 there were 45 students in the schools as a whole. That year, Dunloughan National School closed its doors for the last time. The 15 Dunloughan pupils were taken down to Aillebrack NS where they have stayed ever since. At the time of writing there are healthy numbers in the school and we are thriving. Go mbeidh sé mar sin go brách.
Aillebrack NS, junior infants 2022.