Remembering Galway schooldays and those ties that bind

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It was that teak tough Galway footballing legend Bosco McDermott who summed it up best, when he ruminated on school days and why they stay with you forever.

“When we meet people from our own class or of other classes or of other years, there’s something between us – it’s the shared experience we had. And that shared experience creates a bond…it’s person to person, and I think that bond is unbreakable,” he said.

And he’s right – the guys you went to school with may drop in and out of your life at irregular intervals, but when you do meet, there is no strangeness.

You’re never stuck for something to talk about, even if it is only the good or bad old days; you seamlessly pick up the pieces from wherever you left off – last year or decades ago when you sat in the same classroom.

You don’t even have to have been in the one school at the same time; as Bosco acknowledged, it’s enough that you went to the same school at all, because even if the decades divided you, the experience was much the same.

All of this is brought to mind because of a wonderful new DVD released this week on the first 100 years of St Mary’s College, Galway, which happens to be my old alma mater and the school where Bosco sat as student and teacher.

His grandchildren now attend and his son and namesake is hugely involved in the Parents’ Association – so these truly are ties that bind.

It’s produced by Kieran Concannon, the incredibly talented Inishbofin man whose previous work includes two acclaimed documentaries for TG4 – one on his neighbour island of Inishark, which is now uninhabited, and the other on our own Connacht Tribune.

And it covers that century in some detail, with segments like wonderful and rare footage from the early years like the Corpus Christi procession of 1924 that traditional started on the college grounds before winding its way through the city.

There are evocative photos of classes from the early years with the well-scrubbed young boarders looking like something out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, but this isn’t just looking at a romantic past – the current crop of students and their facilities feature heavily as well.

One young student in particular stands out in this context – Diarmuid Mulkerrins from Moycullen, is the third generation to attend St Mary’s following in the footsteps of his grandfather Martin Mulkerrins, who finished there in 1955, and various uncles on both of his parents’ sides.

He’s the third of his own family – talented handballers all – to go there, after international champion Martin and Diarmuid’s older brother Dara. Two more, Fiachra and Evan, are now in First Year.

For more, read  this week’s Connacht Tribune.