Qualla: All Hallows College

All Hallows College: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

All Hallows was a Catholic priest factory. From 1842 until its last ordination in 1998, the college on Grace Park Road in Drumcondra trained men for missionary work in countries that needed priests faster than their own seminaries could produce them. By 1973, four thousand All Hallows graduates had been ordained for service in England, Scotland, Wales, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, South America, and the West Indies. Up to the late 1890s, more secular priests in California had passed through Drumcondra than through any other single seminary in the world. The college was founded by a Limerick priest called John Hand who realised the Irish diaspora was carrying its faith across oceans faster than the Church could feed it with clergy. He died in 1846. The college he built outlived him by 170 years.

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All Hallows College: The Senator on Holiday

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In autumn 1955, a junior United States senator from Massachusetts came to Ireland on holiday. He was 38, recovering from back surgery, and not yet famous enough that his movements were public news. He came to Drumcondra to visit Father Joseph Leonard, a Vincentian priest at All H...

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All Hallows College: Seven Years to a Priest

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The training programme took seven years. The first three concentrated on what the prospectus called physics, mental philosophy, languages, and English literature - a general humanities and natural sciences foundation that any nineteenth-century university would have recognised. T...

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All Hallows College: After Vatican II

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, reshaped Catholic seminary education across the world. At All Hallows the change was visible within a decade. The college began admitting women from religious orders. It began admitting lay students. It started teaching adult educati...

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All Hallows College: Closing the Doors

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The financial model never quite worked after the seminary disappeared. The Irish state's Free Fees scheme capped how many students All Hallows could enrol, and the college received no direct state funding. A 2014 fundraising effort - including the proposed sale of Jackie Kennedy'...

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All Hallows College: What Remains on the Grounds

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The campus is built around Drumcondra House, an early Georgian mansion the college absorbed when Hand bought the land. The Temple Folly, a small classical structure from 1720, is the oldest building on the site. Purcell House, originally called Junior House, was designed by the a...

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