The original Tuam C.B.S. was housed in a building at Prospect, off the old Ballygaddy Road, that happened to be owned by the Protestant Bishop of Tuam, Thomas Plunket. In June 1859 he refused to renew the lease and demanded vacant possession. On 1 June the sheriff, his bailiffs, and a force of police arrived to take the building. The townspeople, by all accounts, resisted them. It took until 16 June for the eviction to be enforced. The Brothers left for Dublin the same day. The arson that night left the school in ashes - whether by accident, retribution, or some combination of both, no record makes clear. What is clear is that the town reacted by deciding it would have a school again, larger and on its own land.

The new school on Dublin Road opened in November 1861 with just two Brothers. The building housed primary and secondary classes together for decades, with the Brothers' monastery sharing the same walls. A separate primary school went up in the 1940s, freeing space for the secondary side. In 1980 the school moved one more time, to new buildings and a gymnasium behind the old monastery site. The Christian Brothers ran it until 1990, when - facing the same collapse in religious vocations that had hollowed out so many Irish religious orders - they left Tuam. The school passed to the patronage of the Archbishop of Tuam. By then it had been called St Patrick's College for several years, the new name dating from 1990. In 2009 it was amalgamated with its long-standing rival St Jarlath's College, and the two became the new St Jarlath's.

For most of the 20th century, the great fact of school life in Tuam was the rivalry between the C.B.S. and St Jarlath's, the Catholic diocesan boarding college up the road. St Jarlath's was, and remains, an absolute giant of Connacht schoolboy Gaelic football. The C.B.S. was the underdog with the chip on its shoulder. On 16 March 1980 the Brothers' boys made history by beating their rivals in the Connacht Colleges Senior Football Championship final, 1-4 to 0-5, in Tuam Stadium. They did it again in 1989, defeating St Mary's College Galway 0-6 to 0-4 in bad weather on 19 March. And on 12 March 1995 they pulled off the most satisfying of all, beating reigning Connacht and Hogan Cup champions St Jarlath's 0-14 to 1-7. Three provincial titles. Each one a small piece of vindication for the school that had been burned out of its first building.

Football was the obsession, but St Pat's was also unusually strong in basketball. The Tuam side won the All Ireland Colleges Basketball Championship in 1974 and reached the final in 1989. They also took the very first All-Ireland Under-19 Championship in 1980 and the second one in 1981. Then there was the Match of the Century, played 29 May 1974 in Tuam Stadium in front of about 5,000 people as a fundraiser for the school building fund. Thirty minutes of soccer, thirty minutes of Gaelic football, between the Galway county footballers - who would reach that year's All-Ireland final - and a touring side of celebrated soccer players including Eamonn Dunphy, Johnny Giles, Paddy Mulligan, Eoin Hand, and Gerry Daly. The soccer players won 3-13 to 3-11. The referee was Jimmy Moran, whose son Leo would later go on to co-found the Tuam band The Saw Doctors.

The school's notable alumni form a cross-section of late-20th-century Irish public life. Frank Stockwell, All-Ireland football winner with Galway in 1956. Derek Savage, All-Ireland medallist in 1998 and 2001. Mike Cooley, the engineer and trade unionist. The politician Finian McGrath. Leo Moran and Davy Carton of The Saw Doctors, the band whose songs about Tuam - the N17, the Bishop, the railway - became a soundtrack to the town. Jim Carney the poet and journalist. P.J. Smyth and John Tobin, both Galway county footballers. The school is closed now, folded into its old rival. But three Connacht titles, the Match of the Century, and the Saw Doctors are not a small estate to leave behind.