Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,
Cork Independent, 7 November 2013
Technical Memories (Part 60) – Apostles of Education
During late summer before the walking tour season, the column focussed on life in the Crawford Municipal Technical Institute in the 1930s and early 1940s. Like most organisations, World War II had a profound effect on the organisation in terms of funding cutbacks. Despite that, the Institute provided a range of day and nights courses in a variety of subjects. Guy’s Directory of Cork in 1945 lists the following: Engineering – motor car engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry and physics, building construction, carpentry and joinery, cabinet making, plumbing, botany and gardening, Materia Medica, typography, tailors’ cutting, domestic science, machine knitting, shirt-making, telegraphy, telephony, pharmacy, flour milling, power machine work, and continuation courses.
In the archives for the VEC in the Cork City and County Archives, regular conversaziones are listed at the Institute. For example at one of three evenings in October 1945 (15th, 16th and 17th), the principal speaker Professor Alfred O’Rahilly, President of UCC (since 1943) spoke about the importance of vocational education. It is unrecorded what he said but a week earlier as noted in the Cork Examiner Professor O’Rahilly, at the conferring of degrees in UCC, he commented that there were difficult economic times ahead coming out of war torn Europe and that developing professions should concentrate on quality rather than on quantity. With reference to British restrictions on the employment of doctors, the professor argued that there was room in Ireland for more doctors and for a greater medical service and also room for expansion in the other professions. The annual output of medical men from the English and Scottish colleges, he described was about 2,000, and this figure was maintained during the war years. In addition, there were some 20,000 doctors in the British army and it was contemplated that about 8,000 of these would be demobilised before Christmas 1945. Hence, British medical graduates were given preference to jobs. In this light, this made the search for jobs for Irish medical graduates very difficult in Britain.
On the challenge of emigration in the country, O’Rahilly argued that it was not that UCC wished to cater for an export market but that “in a small country like this, the matter was one outside our control; we would wish as far as possible to give preference to our home professions…all we can do here is to equip our graduates not merely with the technical knowledge which they require as professional men and women, but to look to give them as well a proper philosophy of life. So that when they leave this country they will be lay apostles to carry with them something more than mere laboratory or classroom techniques”.
Guy’s Directory of Cork for 1945 lists J F King as the principal of the institute. The committee overseeing it included its chairman, Mr William Ellis as well as members Alderman James Hickey, Alderman Richard S Anthony, TD, Alderman Jeremiah R Connolly, Councillor C Connolly, W Furlong TD, P J O’Brien, Right Rev Dean Sexton PP, Very Rev Dean Babington, Rev Bro H S Byrne, Rev Bro Austin, Michael Egan, James Crosbie, and James Barry. The chaplain was Canon Edward J Fitzgerald who is recorded in the VEC minute books as providing a yearly mass at the start of the September term in the South Chapel for students of the Institute in the 1940s. He was parish priest in the South Chapel from 1924 to 1948. He was the son of Sir Edward Fitzgerald, Lord Mayor of Cork (1901-1903). In May 1955, when the parish of Ballinlough was constituted a separate parish from Blackrock, Canon Fitzgerald became its first parish priest.
One of the Institute’s committee members Dean Sexton, who offered a huge contribution to the Institute died on 20 November 1945. According to the Evening Echo on that evening, the Right Rev Monsignor Patrick Sexton received his early education at the North Monastery and at Christian Brothers’ College, where he was one of the first pupils. He studied for the priesthood at St Finbarr’s Diocesan Seminary and at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, where he was ordained in June 1896. He served at the Dunboyne establishment for about three years where he took out his degree of Doctor of Divinity. His grasp at theology was recognised when he was appointed to All Hallows College, Dublin as Professor of Dogmatic Theology.
Sexton became well known that when the Presidency of Farranferris came up in 1906, and he took the position. During his seventeen years as President he effected many improvements in the college where he took an active interest in every aspect of its welfare. In June 1923 Dr Sexton was appointed Pastor of Blackrock. However after three months, on the death of Rev Dean Shinkwin, Sexton was made parish priest of St Patrick’s Parish and became Dean of Cork. He was in Berlin at the outbreak of World War II, when he was researching German methods of education. On the night war was declared, he was taken into custody but released soon again on condition of reporting to the police every three days. He crossed into neutral Holland four months after his enforced stay in Berlin.
To be continued…
Caption:
716a. Dean Patrick Sexton (source: Cork City Library)