We Were Happy There: A Hundred Years of St Louis High School Rathmines

edited by Ita Daly

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Book
€16.99

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Publication date: 2014

ISBN: 978-1-907535-39-0

Category: Education and History

Type: Paperback

Price: €16.99

When the Sisters of St Louis established a secondary school in Rathmines in 1913, local clergy regarded them as dangerously ‘progressive’ but in reality they were catering for the daughters of the aspiring Catholic middle classes, offering a range of academic subjects, music and art, with an emphasis on ‘deportment’ and accomplishment in ‘all the duties of woman’s sphere’.

The winds of change blew, free secondary education arrived in 1967 and the St Louis High School that celebrates its centenary is a lively and varied educational community that has deep roots in Rathmines while reflecting the diversity of Irish society in the 21st century.

We Were Happy There includes contributions from some of those who spent their youth in its classrooms and corridors. Mary Black sang there; Mary Finan couldn’t sing but managed a speaking part in a musical; Angela Bourke sat for years of Latin in front of Miss Ingram; Ita Daly joined a Marxist-Leninist party while a teacher there (the principal took it in her stride). Many contributors write of choirs, orchestras and musicals; Gráinne Gormley of her feeling of ‘rightness’ when she began to conduct her class choir; Anne Enright of the ‘sweetness and power’ of single-sex education; and Iseult Deane, still a St Louis student, of participating in the writing of ‘Chapter 100’ in the history of the school.

We Were Happy There is an affectionate but perceptive portrait of an Irish girls’ school in a century of change.

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About the editor

Ita Daly was born in County Leitrim but has spent most of her life in Dublin. She was an English teacher when she submitted a story to New Irish Writing and met David Marcus in a Dublin pub (for coffee). Reader, she married him (in 1972). Ita won the Hennessy Literary Award and the Irish Times Short Story Competition and David Marcus (along with Philip MacDermott of Poolbeg Press) published her first, acclaimed, short story collection, The Lady with the Red Shoes, in 1980. She subsequently published four novels with Jonathan Cape/Bloomsbury.

She was both student and teacher in St Louis Rathmines.