The Irish College at Santiago de Compostela, 1605–1769 (review)

Number 44 on Rua Nova in Santiago de Compostella is a typical Galician townhouse in a narrow street, but it has a remarkable history as the home of the Irish College from 1616 to 1769 and is part of a great story: traditional Irish contacts with Galicia as a place of pilgrimage; Irish resistance to the spread of English control and promotion of Protestantism; Spanish determination to make Ireland "England's Netherlands," as revenge for English support of Dutch rebellion; and the success of the Irish Counter-Reformation.

There were twenty-nine Irish colleges in Continental Europe, six of them in Iberia. Patricia O'Connell already published studies of the first (Lisbon, 1590) and the last (Alcalà de Henares, 1649). Santiago, whose geographical closeness to Ireland is often overlooked, provides a rich source for research. Much is known about the lifestyle of the students, who studied philosophy for two years, prior to going to the Irish College at Salamanca for three years of theology. The Santiago College could support no more than sixteen students at any given time, but biographical details are incomplete, despite the sixty-nine pages of biographical information given here. There may have been a total of, at least, 535 students, but erratic record-keeping means that accounts of arrivals at Salamanca do not always have corresponding documentation of departures from Santiago and sometimes we have numbers, but no names.

The Irish exiles in Galicia wanted a boarding school or a student residence at Santiago, and the college was founded as such in 1605 under the guidance of the O'Sullivan family. Within six years, there were rumors that the Jesuits would be given control of the college, and this transfer, fiercely opposed,was made public, on the orders of Philip III, on April 5, 1613. The college became a seminary, supported from the proceeds of the highly unpopular sales tax. All students were obliged to take an oath that they would return to Ireland on completion of their studies.

Spanish Jesuits, who administered the neighboring Royal College, were very reluctant to have a small and impecunious sister college in the same city. This reluctance (evident in similar circumstances at Salamanca in 1596) was not shared by Irish Jesuits, who found, in the early decades, that the Santiago College was a good source of vocations.

The Irish Jesuits tended to come from families who spoke English,whereas the Irish exiles in Galicia spoke Irish. This led to tensions, but the problems during the era of Jesuit administration came from the erratic payment of the royal subvention and from disagreements between the Jesuits and the seminarians in all the colleges. The decline of Spain as a European power led to a decline in the importance of the Irish colleges there, so, after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767, all the colleges were merged with Salamanca, whence the archives came to Maynooth College in the twentieth century.

O'Connell regards the Irish colleges, under Jesuit control, as playing a decisive role in the consolidation of the Irish Counter-Reformation and in the shift in linguistic primacy from Irish to English. The latter conclusion is debatable, but the work done by the author in this and her other books (although regarded by herself as "in essence a pioneering operation") is an invitation for continued research in this area. Her death prevented work on her next project, which would have been a study of the Salamanca College. The field of Hiberno-Spanish studies, to which O'Connell contributed so well, continues to attract new scholarship.