An Irishman’s Diary on St Columba’s College and the Ventry connection

St Columba’s College in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin celebrates its 175th anniversary this year. If the original plans for the college had come to fruition, it would have been located in Ventry, Co Kerry. Creid é nó ná creid!

A plan for such a college was discussed by four men as they sat on a cliffside in Corca Dhuibhne in the summer of 1840, looking out on the Blasket Islands. All four were zealous in the cause of religion, and in particular to enticing Catholics in the Irish-speaking areas of the country away from what they saw as darkness and superstition into the light of the true faith – Protestantism. One of the four, Thomas Moriarty, was the Protestant curate of Ventry. He had been born a Catholic in Corca Dhuibhne, had converted as a young man and become a successful missionary – or, in the language of condemnation spoken from Catholic pulpits, he was a pervert and a proselytiser. In the 1840s, Moriarty had a congregation of more than 200 people in Ventry, with a church, schoolhouse, rectory and houses for converts. There were also Protestant enclaves, or colonies, in Dingle town at that time.

Moriarty was also the agent of a society with the impressive title “The Irish Society for promoting the education of the native Irish through the medium of their own language”. The Irish Society was formed in 1818 and directed its work at areas where Irish was the main or only language. The ostensible aim was to teach people to read in Irish, using only the Irish bible as a text. The hope was that readers would then be attracted to Protestantism. The Irish Society teachers were known as na bíoblóirí – the biblers, or the gospellers. Its main areas of success were in Kingscourt, Co Cavan and Corca Dhuibhne.

Moriarty’s three companions in August 1840 were Viscount Adare, MP, son of Lord Dunraven, William Sewell, an English intellectual, and William Monsell of Clarina, Co Limerick. Moriarty was convinced that the survival of the new Protestant communities around the country depended on having fluent Irish speakers – like him – as ministers. He knew that the people had far more respect for such leaders than for English-speaking ministers. It was Moriarty who formulated plans for a college, with the Irish language central to its ethos, which would prepare young men for entry to Trinity College to study theology,

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The men went as far as identifying a site in Ventry for the college, but the three visitors took a different course over the following months and made plans without any further involvement by Moriarty. In April 1843, St Columba’s College was established in its first location of Stackallan, Co Meath. Sewell gave a speech on the opening day and generously acknowledged that Moriarty was “the first person into whose heart God put the thought” of building such a college. He recalled the day spent “on one of the wild Atlantic cliffs of that desolate but interesting coast” of west Kerry, and said that “it was on that spot, with that clergyman for its chief director, that it was first intended to establish the present institution, though on a far humbler scale”.

St Columba’s moved to Rathfarnham in 1849. Although Sewell had severed his links with it by then, he is still remembered as one of the main founders. He returned to England and set up Radley College in Oxfordshire along the same lines as St Columba’s. In 1850, on the death of his father, Viscount Adare became 3rd Earl of Dunraven and he converted to Catholicism in 1855; William Monsell also became a Catholic.

Thomas Moriarty realised his dream and established Ventry Collegiate School, and it was on a humbler scale. In the early 1850s, it had 12 students and some did indeed go on to Trinity College and became ministers in Irish-speaking districts.

In time, the colonies and Ventry Collegiate School faded away and few traces remain today. Moriarty is rather unfairly remembered in folklore by the insulting nickname applied to him while he lived: Tomás an éithigh – Thomas of the lie, or lying Tom. He was regarded as a turncoat or a “souper”, but in truth he was a man of principle, a formidable intellectual, and a charismatic preacher whose fund-raising tours in Ireland and Britain raised huge amounts of money for the beleaguered Protestant colonies in Corca Dhuibhne.

Moriarty was thick-skinned, but it pained him to be thought of as less Irish than his Catholic neighbours and he once posed these questions: “Am I not Irish, heart and soul and tongue? Have we not Irish hearts and love of country and as much Irish blood as they?”