It is a situation that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.The Christian Brothers, a group that dominated Irish education for decades with an almost imperial might, announced this week that it would hand over control of its schools to a lay trust within weeks.
Having educated the Irish masses for generations, the Brothers have decided that their future lies in other activities.
They are campaigning for improved education for children in Africa, and raising issues such as environmental pollution and Aids.
At home they will still have direct involvement with a small number of children who do not fit into mainstream schools.
But from September, their direct control of Irish schools will be gone.
Of course there will still be Christian Brothers schools in Ireland, but their national management body will be a trust, composed mostly of lay members. The passing of 96 schools -- and the education of 35,000 pupils -- from the Christian Brothers is another sign of the congregation's relentless decline from a position of unrivalled strength. "There are currently around 320 brothers in the country, but we have not had any new members for quite a while,'' says Brother Kevin Mullan, the Dublin-based leader of the Christian Brothers European Province. The vast majority of members are aged over 65.
Their often vocal critics have accused previous generations of Brothers of an almost cultish brutality. Their defenders argue that the schooling they provided offered a route out of poverty and a path to social advancement that would not have been available otherwise.
"They provided education for people from relatively poor backgrounds when nobody else was doing it,'' says Pat Diggins, the layman who will chair the new Edmund Rice Schools Trust (named after the founder). "We hope that the setting up of this new trust will give the schools a bright future.''
Many past pupils of the Christian Brothers acknowledge both the good and the bad aspects of their education. Few look back on their schooling by the brothers with particular fondness, but most have a measure of gratitude.
What is not in dispute is that the Christian Brothers shaped the Irish state as much as any other institution. They provided the shock troops of Irish nationalism -- 125 past pupils of just one Christian Brothers institution, the O'Connell School, took part in the Easter Rising.
Seven of the executed leaders were past pupils of Christian Brothers schools. The Brothers have supplied nine out of 12 Taoisigh, countless cabinet ministers, the core of the civil service, the leadership of Sinn Fein and both major presenters of the Late Late Show. Pat Kenny, educated at the O'Connell School in Dublin's North Inner City, probably spoke for many in the burgeoning new Irish middle class when he suggested that he owed his success to them.
"I owe my education to them. Our family was poor -- my father hadn't a penny -- but I got scholarships all the way through school,'' recalled the presenter in an interview. "What I've become I owe entirely to the Christian Brothers.''
But Kenny was not afraid to speak out about the downside. He regretted the "physical and psychological intimidation'' suffered by pupils at his school.
Gay Byrne once recalled a year of utter misery at the Christian Brothers school in Synge Street, with beatings a daily occurrence. But he also acknowledged a "fantastically rounded education''.
The Labour TD Emmet Stagg was much less ambivalent calling the Brothers from his childhood "the greatest shower of savages and sadistic bastards I've met''. In recent years the Brothers from the middle of the last century have almost become a byword for overly oppressive schooling. For the middle-aged Irish male, past suffering at the hands of brothers is now a standard part of the literary or comic repertoire.
Roger McGough, the Liverpool Irish poet educated at a Christian Brothers school on Merseyside, summed it up in a tiny poem: "It's like hitting your head against a brick wall, said Brother Ryan. As he hit my head against a brick wall.'' Even James Bond in the form of Meath's own Pierce Brosnan has mistakenly been cast in the role of Christian Brothers' victim in the press. In fact he went to a De La Salle school.
Brother Kevin Mullan does not flinch from tackling the issue of cruelty inflicted on children. "We are deeply saddened by the negative experiences that people had and we certainly apologise for that.''
Historian Dr Daire Keogh, who has written extensively about the order, says the issue of corporal punishment should be understood in the context of the time. "You have to remember that corporal punishment was taking place in the vast majority of schools right up until the 1970s.''
Edmund Rice, who founded the Christian Brothers in Waterford in the early nineteenth century, was actually against corporal punishment. Other leaders of the congregation also tried to clamp down on physical chastisement, but their attempts were unsuccessful.
Dr Keogh said the more positive part of the Brothers' legacy was the creation of a meritocracy in Ireland.
Parents rushed to send their kids to the Brothers, because they knew that they could provide upward social mobility. "They fostered ambition and they paved the way for free education in Ireland. When they took in kids to their schools, they were prepared to take kids whose parents could not pay.''
It was fitting that the announcement of the ceding of control of education by the Brothers has taken place in the week when Brian Cowen, the first Fianna Fail leader not to have been educated by them, entered the Taoiseach's office.
Having lost their political clout, the Brothers are in some ways returning to their roots. "We are going back to our origins,'' says Brother Mullan. "There is more of a spiritual focus now.
"I think the schools have preserved much of their original ethos. They are open to all-comers -- a wide spectrum of society including a large number of newcomer children and children with special needs.''
Eamon De Valera summed up the importance of the schools when he declared that Ireland "owes more than it probably will ever realise to the Christian Brothers''.
Nobody can deny their influence but their ceding of control of schools is surely one of the final nails in the coffin of De Valera's Ireland.
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