Glenstal Abbey School - History

History

Glenstal is a Norman Revivalist Castle, designed by William Bardwell, an English architect and built by Sir Matthew Barrington in 1839. Sir Charles and Lady Barrington left Ireland permanently in 1925 and the castle and estate were purchased shortly after by a priest, Monsignor James Ryan, for the nominal sum of £2,000. Some months after the purchase, Msgr Ryan wrote to Celestine Golenvaux, the Abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Mared­sous, and invited him to come to Ireland and set up a daughter house in Glenstal and by March 1927, the first two Belgian monks had arrived at Glenstal to establish the new house.

In September 1932, the monks opened a Secondary School with Fr Columba Skerret as Headmaster, and with an intake of just seven pupils. The first lay teacher of the school was Vincent Quirke, from Wexford.

Read more about this topic:  Glenstal Abbey School

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

    Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...
    Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)