AS HE went about the task of buying Grattan’s Parliament out of existence during 1799, the Irish viceroy Lord Cornwallis had to brace himself. “My occupation is now of the most unpleasant nature”, he wrote: “negotiating and jobbing with the most corrupt people under heaven”.
One of the more high-minded projects to emerge from the subsequent horse-trading was the Old Borough School in Swords. This was the fruit of a £15,000 compensation fund awarded to the north Dublin town: part of the overall £1.26 million paid in pensions, peerages, and other blandishments to ease the Act of Union through.
In the case of Swords, the money was for the loss of two parliamentary seats, whose recent incumbents had depended heavily on the support of “pot wallopers”. To qualify for a vote then, you had to wallop (an old word for “boil“) your own pot in the locality: ie be a permanent resident.
But the clause was much abused, and the successful candidates in Swords’ 1790 elections had imported substantial numbers of settlers long enough to be franchised.
Endowment of a school for the borough’s poor, without religious distinction, looks in retrospect like a good exchange for such democracy. In any case, a site was acquired at 72 Main Street. And no less an architect than Francis Johnston – also responsible for the GPO – was hired to design the building, which opened in 1809.
It was ahead of its time. Apart from a handful of royal establishments and various private academies, most education then still took place in “hedge schools”. These were not typically located in the open air. Hedges were temporary shelters – the prefabs of their time – while proper accommodation, if only a barn, was found. As late as the 1824 there were 9,000 such schools in Ireland, with 400,000 pupils.
Education remained therefore largely in the hands of men whose reputation was humorously defended by William Carleton: a graduate of the system (and later a teacher) himself.
The character of these “worth and eccentric persons” had been unfairly maligned, he wrote, “for the stigma attached to their want of knowledge should rather have been applied to their want of morals”. Morality was not in any case expected of them by the peasantry, he claimed: on the contrary, one of the things that recommended a good hedge schoolmaster was “an inordinate love of whiskey, and if to this could be added a slight touch of derangement, the character was complete.”
A big reason for those schools’ continuing popularity, despite everything, soon raised its head in Swords. By 1826, the Old Borough School (OBS) had 270 Catholic pupils and 60 Protestants. But the teachers and board of trustees were all Anglican and there were complaints that Catholic students were being taught “the Protestant Bible”.
Not all the issues were sectarian. In 1842, it was also complained that female students had been “kept at needlework after school hours and not dismissed until nightfall, to the danger of their health and morals”.
The religious issue rankled most, however, and in 1853, Catholic pupils were withdrawn en masse to set up the New Borough School (NBS). Almost a decade later, opposing clerics in the dispute were still exchanging (very long) letters in The Irish Times, touching on everything from the proselytising tendencies of the board to winter heating and the distribution of the trustees’ stock of “best Whitehaven coal”.
The row rumbled into the 1880s when the House of Commons heard that the OBS now housed only about 40 students, half of them the children of “comfortable farmers and shopkeepers” and many no more resident in the borough than the pot-wallopers of old; while still claiming most of the endowment at the expense of the bourgeoning Catholic school.
The dispute was finally settled, somehow, well in time for the first centenary; and the second 100 years of the OBS were rather less contentious. The big problem was falling numbers. By 1961, there were so few students it was possible to accommodate them in the study of the local vicarage and to lease the old premises to the NBS, in which overcrowding was the problem.
In 1969, the OBS closed altogether for several years and local Anglican children had to be educated in exile: in Malahide. Then the tide turned. The school reopened in 1977, and numbers recovered. It now claims a respectable 108 students, who will form a guard of honour this coming Friday in Swords during celebrations of the bicentenary.
The Francis Johnston- designed building did not quite reach the landmark, at least as an educational establishment. It was deemed inadequate to a modern school’s needs a few years back and students moved to a new premises. But the original building still stands, albeit dedicated to a different purpose. In a twist that would have surprised its founders, if not William Carleton, it is now a pub.
fmcnally@irishtimes.com