Search Results for 'St Joseph's Patrician College'

Tonight (Thursday Oct 3), the Leaving Certificate Class of 1984 from Saint Joseph’s College, affectionately known as “The Bish,” will gather at Taylor’s Bar on Dominick Street Upper from 8pm to celebrate four decades since they left the halls of their alma mater.

Bish oarsmen past and present and their families gathered in Galway Rowing club, in the heart of Rowing Country, to formally launch their much-anticipated inaugural Yearbook 2023.

Nearly every day since the pandemic commenced, two great servants to Galway sport gather behind so called enemy lines to talk about football and life.

The Patrician Brothers, at the invitation of the last Catholic Warden of Galway, arrived in Galway in 1826 and a month later they opened St Patrick’s Monastery and School on Market Street. They initially had 200 pupils but this figure rapidly grew so that during the Famine, there were more than 1,000 boys being educated, fed, and many of them clothed there every day. The school was a major success but there were no educational facilities for older boys in the ‘lower orders’ in Galway so Bishop McEvilly invited the Patrician Brothers to set up a secondary school.

The Bish has added another basketball trophy to its cabinet, winning the U14A Subway Schools Cup on Monday.

The distinguished historian Gerry Hayes McCoy, a graduate of the Bish, once wrote of his alma mater: “Going to school is the greatest emotional experience of a lifetime, the greatest and least forgettable. Do you remember how the sun shone through that wire-meshed window, shone in on your childhood, the bright sun of long ago? Do you smell again the smell of school-warm varnish, leather, bread and butter, ink, powder, books, boys? Do you remember the flinty yard, tree-shaded; the speaking river; the screaming seagulls on a frosty morning? How cold could it be! Do you remember the lighting of the fire — how it smoked without heat, how it smouldered. Do you remember the wonderful morning when the key of the school was lost and who-was-it was sent up town to the shop where — how unsporting — they kept a box of keys to thwart just so delirious a possibility.”