A Special Place: Scoil Mhuire Cork

Various Contributors

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Book
€30.00

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Publication date: 2018

Category: Education and History

Type: Paperback with flaps

Price: €30.00

In 1951 two Cork women returned from the teacher training college in Manchester in which they had been lecturing to establish their own secondary school for the girls of their native city. Their dream, which they never relinquished, was to put into practice modern educational theory while demanding the highest possible standards – personally, academically and spiritually – from their pupils. Scoil Mhuire Junior School followed three years later and found its permanent home in St St Patrick’s Place.

Generations of Cork women had reason to be grateful for the vision of the foundresses, which was feminist avant la lettre and inculcated in them the belief that, whatever they chose to do in life, they could excel in their field.

The contributors to A Special Place tell of the influence, not only of Mary O’Donovan and Kathleen Cahill but of many other teachers over the decades, of sporting successes, big and small, of singing and performing and of exciting excursions to Ringabella and further afield. As girls will be girls, mischief was often afoot as well, with an abundance of ‘laughter and the love of friends’.

And still the girls in their distinctive Scoil Mhuire uniform, from the smallest junior school recruit of four to the coolest eighteen-year-old, troop up and down St Patrick’s Hill and along Wellington Road, with the same inimitable mixture of merriment and confidence in their future.