Carndonagh College

In the gallery below, we have some archive photos from Carndonagh College. The College opened in the Colgan Hall as a secondary school for boys in the peninsula in 1960. 66 boys were on the roll at the time.

Rev. Kevin McKenna, a native of Moneyneena, Co Derry, was appointed the first Principal. He served for three years before Rev. Art O’Reilly replaced him. Fr.McKenna returned as Principal in 1971 and remained in this post until 1973, during which time he managed to oversee the amalgamation of the College with the Convent Secondary School and the Vocational School.

Students at the college studied a ‘full range of academic and scientific subjects’, along with extra-curricular activities such as sports and occasional European school tours. The first Leaving Cert class sat the exam in 1964.

Some of the teaching staff was shared with the Convent. The Convent and the College were amalgamated into the new Carndonagh Community School in 1972, with some classes continuing to be taught in the Colgan Hall for a short time.

In this article, Sean Beattie recalls his time teaching in Carndonagh College, before and after the almagamation into the Community School.

Carndonagh College: The Final Countdown
– Seán Beattie

I joined the staff of Carndonagh College in 1971 and taught in the Colgan Hall over the next three years. There were four priests on the staff. For my first six weeks, Fr. O’Reilly was Principal and in mid-October Fr. McKenna took charge. The former had been my Latin teacher in St. Columb’s in Derry so I felt comfortable in my new job. My induction to the teaching profession had already taken place in St. Joseph’s Secondary School in Creggan, Derry and in the City of Dublin Vocational School in Ballyfermot. The change from working in large urban schools to a small rural college was welcome. My timetable for 1971-2 included my degree subjects, English, History and French.

All classes were held in the Colgan hall at this time. Facilities were basic: a blackboard, duster, chalk and desks. Among the students was a pupil from Moville called Paul Fiorentini, who would subsequently become principal of the Community School. In the previous school year, one of the students in Fr. Jack Gallagher’s English class was a Buncrana pupil called Frank McGuinness, now Professor of Creative Writing in UCD and one of Ireland’s leading playwrights. Latin was still a requirement for the National University colleges and Fr. McKenna took classes in Latin.

In September 1972, the boys’ college amalgamated with the girls’ Convent Secondary School, with about four hundred pupils in total. Teachers travelled between classes on the two sites. Fortunately, students knew the score and got on with their work pending the arrival of the teacher. It was quite a challenge to finish one class in the hall at 11 am and arrive in time for the next class in the convent starting at the same time. It gave a whole new meaning to outdoors education. Staff who had cars had an advantage over teachers who depended on lifts. Fortunately speed cameras were forty years away.

The Colgan Hall has been involved in education since 1919 and the ground floor was originally designed with educational facilities in mind. There was a large science classroom which was identical in style and layout to its counterpart in St. Columb’s College. Next door, there was a small library which consisted of a single shelf of books all around the room. Most of the books had been culled from priests’ collections in the diocese and included some gems, i.e. Colgan’s Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae and the Annals of the Four Masters to name but two. Several rare books were on public display among them The Life of Hugh Roe O’Donnell by Lughaidh O’Clery, published in 1895. In fact many of the other texts featured Fr. John Colgan’s life and works. Few classrooms in the country could claim to have such a fine collection of material at first hand and the library was a great teaching resource. There were two other large rooms for general subjects. The corridor was used as a staff room but subsequently staff moved to a store room behind the stage. The offices of the Principal and Secretary were in the basement. Students had few books apart from the basic texts. In some subjects, teachers dictated notes instead and these were recycled on an annual basis. In many subjects the texts were of poor quality and such notes were essential. This was quite a contrast to the schools in Derry City where the Ministry of Education provided complete sets of books for every student in each subject.

I recall the famous Folen’s Notes in English and History. They were published by a Belgian refugee called Albert Folens who lived in Dublin and spotted a business opportunity in the developing world of Irish education as numbers exploded with the advent of free education. Dublin-based teachers recall him in a large overcoat doing the rounds flogging his teachers’ notes and buying paper from printers. The early notes were hand-written, photocopied, stapled and printed on light newsprint. They looked cheap but were written by experts and were in great demand. The notes in English were outstanding and I used them for many years even after the arrival of new text books. Within a short time, Folens opened a publishing business and to-day the company is one of the largest suppliers of books in Ireland and is a multi-million euro industry.

As a new Principal, Fr. McKenna saw himself as a new broom and he made many small but important changes in the college which improved conditions for staff and students. Tarmac was laid on the paths outside and some rooms were painted. He invited me to start a school magazine and we had it published by the following Christmas. Looking back at the first edition of Inisdúinn from 1971, I am surprised at the quality of the writing and the beauty of some of the poetry. The first cover was designed by a graphic designer from Columba Press in Dublin. It also listed the achievements of pupils of the college in preceding years and it makes impressive reading.
In Fr. McKenna’s former school in Maghera, Co. Derry, the school magazine always contained class photos and he thought this would be a good idea. It certainly was and the photos taken from 1971 onwards for the school magazine are a fantastic legacy of earlier days. Thus every issue of the magazine recorded photos of every class in the school apart from a gap in publication in the late 1980s. Inisdúinn is still being published forty-four years later. Former students who visit the Community School can view the full collection of photos on display in one of the corridors. It can be a challenging experience trying to identify former classmates disguised under massive hairstyles and dressed in a bizarre range of “uniforms”.

I recall some unusual visitors to the college. One of them was the Memory Man from Strabane who could tell you the day of the week on which you were born if you gave him the date. Fr. McKenna ensured such visitors never left empty handed and the Memory Man was a regular visitor.

The college was the lifeblood of the hall and its closure in June 1973 heralded the end of a great phase in the history of education in the Inishowen peninsula. But as the yellow JCB’s cleared the lands at Moore’s field in 1973, beyond Thompson’s Bridge, a new era was beginning with the opening of the Community School (CCS) which amalgamated all three second-level schools in the town and served the entire peninsula. But the hall got one final lease of life which lasted for a school year until June 1974.

The new building was not ready for occupation in September 1973 and the classrooms of the old schools remained open. In fact, the first classes in the Community School were held in the Colgan Hall, thus providing a link between the present campus at CCS and the early days of the hall when classes in crafts were provided by the Congested Districts Board. The Board was partly responsible for the design of the hall and paid for furniture in the new classrooms when the hall was built in 1914.

I vividly recall walking past the iron gates of the hall and seeing the first students of CCS assembled inside. It was an exciting moment as we had campaigned for years for a new secondary school and at last the World Bank had come to our rescue with a quarter of a million pounds. While many regretted the closure of the old schools, we were pioneers in a great new experiment in Irish education and formed one of the first ten landmark community schools in the country. On that September morning in 1973 Fr. McKenna and Jim A. McDonough, Vice-Principal, welcomed staff and students as they passed the gates of the Colgan hall to become the first students of CCS. In 2013, the school celebrated 40 years of education, the first day of which was in the Colgan hall. After the distribution of timetables, teachers marched the new first years off to their classrooms in the hall and the first day of CCS ended at noon when Swilly busses arrived outside the hall to take students home. It was my first day in CCS also and in total, I was destined to spend over thirty-two years as a permanent, full-time teacher and guidance counsellor in the town. I also served for seven years as one of the first teacher representatives on the Board of Management.