IT WOULD take a Cicero to do justice to “the enormous contribution” of St Nathy’s College, Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, to Irish education and Irish society, former Trinity College provost and Press Council chairman Prof Tom Mitchell said at the weekend.The form of education offered there was “of the highest value” and “based on the great European liberal tradition which can be traced back to Plato and the Sophists”, he said.
A former pupil of St Nathy’s, Prof Mitchell, the first Catholic provost of Trinity, was launching a book, St Nathy’s 1810 to 2010, Reflections and Memories of Past Pupils, as part of the college’s bicentenary celebrations.
“All of us pupils have reason to be immensely proud of this great institution” which provided such an education “through the darkest years of this State for many like myself who had been born on subsistence farms,” he said.
The State owed a great debt to the college “and the generosity of its priests . . . who dedicated their lives to educating young people”. They “provided the greatest service to Irish society when the State couldn’t do so”.
Prof Mitchell spoke of how “respect for education was embedded in the Irish psyche. His own mother “was totally obsessed about education”.
He recalled a story, “possibly apocryphal”, told about an elderly farmer in the townland near Foxford from where Prof Mitchell hails, who once remarked: “Didn’t Tom do well. Sure he has the education, and education is the main thing. If you haven’t an education these days, you have to use your brains.”
The college trustee, patron and Bishop of Achonry Brendan Kelly recalled that St Nathy’s was in existence almost a century before a clerical head was appointed and now it was moving back to lay men and women teachers.
Commenting on the St Nathy’s motto, Robur Nathaei (the strength of Nathy), he said it reflected a view, as narrated in the book, that there was “virtue in hardship . . . that to suffer was good, to make us men and make us strong . . . ”
St Nathy’s president Fr Martin Convey spoke of 2010 as “a very special year” when “the school celebrates . . . the fast-flowing river of learning that St Nathy’s has become”.
He and all the speakers thanked Fr Leo Henry, who edited and compiled the book, for undertaking what Bishop Kelly described as a “mammoth task”.
SIC: IT