How Charles, that urbane Oxonian in Evelyn Waugh's novel, remembers his first rapturous visit to Brideshead is how I recall my first visit to the idyllic village of Roundstone in Connemara in June 1950. Sunny days, cloudless skies, the cry of gulls over the little harbour and a line of creamy foam beating on a rock-studded shore. A group of us, wild students from a college in the midlands, were holidaying in the old Franciscan monastery just down from the village where the good Brothers ran a modest farm and the local primary school as they had being doing since 1835.
A statue of St Francis stood on the lawn in front of the snow-white building which formed a courtyard. Monks shuffled round in brown habits, chirpy and cheerful, each to his own task. Languid days and the world was all before us as we spent days boating, swimming, mountain-climbing and at night listening to Br Alphonsus playing the mandolin.
I little thought that I would return, three decades later, to lament, like some Bardic poet of Elizabethan times, the callous, thoughtless demolition of this hallowed building which played a long, important but quiet role in the life of the local community.
Village charm
Roundstone has now become the mecca for foreign tourists who flock here to savour the old-world charm of the village where the novelist, Kate O'Brien, made her home for many years. Among the first visitors to arrive in 1842 was that distinguished man of letters, William Thackeray. If we are to judge from his comments in his Irish Sketch Book he was neither impressed with the veracity of the witnesses at the local petty sessions nor with the scenic views. But then he was hard to please.
Of the buildings that caught his critical eye was a two-storeyed edifice, "a sort of a lay convent being a community of brothers of the third order of Saint Francis" founded with the approval of none other than the Reverend John McHale, Archbishop of Tuam. The author of Vanity Fair acknowledged the good work done by the Brothers but he railed against the pretentious title given to his Lordship in the inscription carved on the front of the building: "his Grace the Lord Archbishop of Tuam".
The Lion of the West, Dr John McHale, became, after Cardinal Cullen of Dublin, the most formidable Catholic prelate in 19th-century Ireland. Even before his appointment to Tuam in 1834 his stature had grown through his polemical writing addressed to the British establishment which ranged from the necessity of a Catholic education for the Irish people to warnings against the insidious activities of the Bible societies along the western seaboard.
He rallied a demoralised and illiterate people who were prey for the soupers. His weapon was the McHale Irish catechism. When the Board of Commissioners for national schools was set up in 1831, the Lion of the West was fierce in his opposition to the scheme, regarding it as an invitation to proselytism.
Anti-Irish
In the view of the Archbishop, the national schools were anti-Catholic since most of the Board members were Protestant, and as English was the sole medium of instruction and Irish history was neglected, they were anti-Irish. Despite the generous funding offered, McHale denounced every aspect of the scheme including the Board's textbooks. Taking such a lone and intransigent stand, the question of how the children of his Archdiocese were to be educated had to be faced. McHale's answer to the provision of elementary education for his flock and the evangelical activities of the Bible societies was the introduction of the Franciscan Brothers - his footsoldiers in the fight against perversion and in the pursuit of an education in which a spirit of religion would inform the whole work of the school.
In the context of today's well-financed primary education system, the Archbishop's austere plan of monastic schooling had more than a touch of medievalism. Advising his priests to have the Franciscans in their parishes to run the schools, his Lordship could report in 1865 that he had 11 communities, each having its primary school, free from the Board's control and supported solely by the labour of the Brothers. Most of the houses were located in remote, famine-stricken areas like Clifden, Tourmakeady, Achill and Roundstone. Many of the earlier monks were artisans who taught their skills to the local people.
Against the tide
They became, as Francis Of Assisi would have wished, beacons of light in the surrounding gloom. Yet their numbers were small and the need for education great and in resisting the Board's national schools, a uniform and generally accepted system, McHale was swimming against the tide. He has been accused of retarding educational progress in his Archdiocese, being over-protective of his flock and suspicious of change.
After the death of their patron, the Brothers placed their schools under the National Board where they remained until the middle of this century when economic progress and a lack of vocations took their toll. One by one the older men passed away with no one to fill the ranks thinned by death.
And thus it was that Roundstone Monastery, a heavenly haven, enriched and mellowed by the spirits of generations of monks, enclosed by high walls that held mutinous waves at bay during winter, was sold in 1974 to the IDA as a site for an indigenous craft centre. The building was bulldozed.
All that remains of this heritage is the tall silent bell-tower standing somewhat forlornly with the inscription to which Thackeray took such exception. It stands like a judgment on the tastless functional collection of workshops fenced by high mesh wire beneath. Why, one asks, could not this building be converted to a use appropriate to the role and place it occupied for so long in the community.