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Reviewed by:
  • Dominican Education in Ireland, 1820–1930
  • Maria Luddy
Dominican Education in Ireland, 1820–1930. By Maire M. Kealy, O.P. (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press. 2007. Pp. xx, 236. $32.50 paperback. ISBN 978-0-716-52889-0.)

The primary focus of this book is the contribution that women of the Dominican Order made to education in Ireland in the period between 1820 and 1930. The author provides a good context in which this contribution is explored, and in the introduction we are given a clear idea of the “Dominican ethos in education.” There is a short survey of the history of Dominican women in Ireland between 1124 and 1820, and a historiographical section on issues relating to women’s education in Ireland in the nineteenth century. Following this introductory context the author then, in a clear and accessible fashion, details the evolution of Dominican education in Ireland at primary, secondary, and higher levels.

Kealy provides a wealth of information on the development of education in Ireland in the nineteenth century. The newly emerging congregations of female religious from the late-eighteenth century conducted boarding schools for the upper classes, with attached free schools for the poor. The lower middle class benefited from the introduction of pay “day schools.” Before the introduction of the National School system of education in Ireland in 1832 there were at least thirty convent schools around the country. It was through their work as educators that nuns played a profound part in socializing the Irish population into formal Catholicism, particularly in the period after the Great Famine. The Dominican sisters, while catering to some extent to the poor, were primarily educators of the Irish Catholic middle class. The sisters utilized the opportunities provided by government for their pupils and took advantage, eventually, of the intermediate examination system to advance the interests of their students. The nuns also played a significant role in advancing university education for Irish women. The Dominican College in Dublin’s Eccles Street was the first establishment in Ireland to make university education possible, through the Royal University system, for Catholic women.

With all the emphasis on education Kealy also provides the reader with an account of the ways in which the Dominican community itself evolved in Ireland over the period. We are told of the amalgamation of various communities, the disputes that occurred between the Sisters and some bishops, their dealings with officials from the department of education. There is an excellent account of the formation and work of the Conference of Convent Secondary Schools of Ireland (CCSS). Using a wide variety of sources, including the extensive archives of the Dominicans and a number of oral histories, this work celebrates the trials and tribulations of the Dominican involvement in education at all levels in Irish society. It adds considerably to the growing [End Page 596] literature on female religious and the education of girls and young women in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Ireland.

Maria Luddy
University of Warwick
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