Qualla: St Patrick's College, Tuam

St Patrick's College, Tuam: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the night of 16 June 1859, after the Christian Brothers had been forcibly evicted from their rented schoolhouse in Tuam, somebody broke in, set the building alight, and burned it to the ground. The Brothers were already on a train back to Dublin. The school had a name - Tuam Christian Brothers School, opened in 1851 by Brother Laurence Lowe - but no longer a building. What happened over the next eighteen months was unusual enough in Famine-era Ireland: Archbishop John MacHale called a meeting in the sacristy of the cathedral, donated a site on the Dublin Road, and by November 1861 the school was open again. The foundation stone of the building that would carry its name for the next century and a half had been laid the previous March 17 - Saint Patrick's Day, 1860 - and so the school eventually took its name from the saint whose feast day saw it begun.

St Patrick's College, Tuam: The Eviction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, ...

St Patrick's College, Tuam: A Hundred Years on the Dublin Road

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 seconda...

St Patrick's College, Tuam: The Rivalry With St Jarlath's

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

St Patrick's College, Tuam: Basketball and the Match of the Century

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 i...

St Patrick's College, Tuam: Who Came Through

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 McG...