Jerome was different. He wasn’t escaping anything, so much as racing to embrace the world. After teacher training he left Ireland to become a missionary in the West Indies. The ignorant chatter among schoolboys was that the brothers were free to beat as much as they wanted on the missions, so that when they came back home they were half savage. In fact mission service had a radicalising effect on the Irish religious orders. Men like Jerome arrived in the West Indies and Africa as the colonial era was coming to an end and nationalist movements were on the rise. Those who came home often found themselves at odds with the stifling conservatism of Ireland. Jerome’s response to the country he found on his return was to try and change the children who entered his school: fill them up with ideas about justice; make them want to change their world.
The initial impression created by his formidable appearance was unfounded. When we filed into the big hall to be welcomed by Jerome he asked rather than told us to sit down, and when he spoke it wasn’t with the declamatory bellow of the staffroom autocrat but with calm assurance. He started to use words like ‘responsibility’ and ‘potential’. I remember being a little shocked. I’d expected nothing more than a list of do’s and don’ts. School was about rules and punishments. Jerome did list the rules – neat uniform, hair an inch above the collar, expulsion for bullying – but most of the talk was about how we should use school to get the best out of ourselves.
I did not immediately distinguish myself. Within a couple of weeks I was in trouble for talking repeatedly in class. In Pres you weren’t beaten by the headmaster for breaking the rules. Jerome did not approve of corporal punishment. He had his own sliding scale of punishments. You might be given detention or extra homework. If the offence was sufficiently serious, parents would be called in or you could be suspended. At the end of the line there was expulsion which good middle-class boys dreaded, for in Cork it was the kind of stain which might tarnish a reputation for ever.
A fortnight after arriving I found myself arraigned before Jerome. My co-accused was the future Ireland and British Lions rugby star, Michael Kiernan. We were thrown out of class and sent to Jerome’s office for talking despite repeated warnings. Jerome was sitting with his arms folded, shaking his head and looking at us as if we’d committed murder. After a few seconds of that baleful glare you not only believed that you’d killed someone but would’ve willingly signed a confession attesting to the fact. Jerome had big presence.
‘Right, gentlemen,’ said Jerome, ‘what have you got to say for yourselves?’
We snivelled something about being sorry and not getting into trouble again.
‘I am sure that’s true,’ he said, ‘but first I have a job for you both.’
It was dark by the time we’d finished cleaning a long section of the Mardyke Walk. Immortalised by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sean O’Faolain as the haunt of lovers in his story The Talking Trees, the mile-long thoroughfare ran from the school gates towards the west of the city and parallel to the River Lee, the rugby pitches of Pres and the grounds of the Cork Cricket Club, forming a green band between the river and the road.
With a faint rain falling we stood under the yellow street lights waiting for Jerome. So intimidated were we by his presence that by the time we’d finished, the Mardyke was, in the words of my grandmother, clean enough to eat your dinner from. Jerome smiled at us when he arrived: ‘Now, lads, you’ve made a very useful contribution to society. Off home with ye!’
The clean-up operation was tedious and exhausting but it did not seek to humiliate. And to anybody who’d been on the receiving end of a cane or a leather strap that was a revolutionary concept.
But I kept on getting into trouble, always for mouthing off in class or playing the fool. I engaged with those subjects I found interesting such as English and history but switched off when it came to maths and science. I refused to apply myself to things which bored me and would either retreat into my old habit of daydreaming or seek to entertain my colleagues with impressions of the teachers. I had inherited some of the Keanes’ love of mischief-making; I was also very desperate for notice. I was perpetually late and an inventor of some genius when it came to explaining missing homework. After a few months of determined attention seeking I received my first suspension from school. This was serious. Three strikes and you were out altogether.
Jerome called me in. He was shaking his head as I walked through the door. ‘You are in a bad position, boy. You need to make some choices,’ he said. He went on to describe the options. They were few but emphatic: I could stop messing and work hard, or leave and go to some far less gentlemanly establishment, in other words back to the world of Lonergan and his cohorts. I pictured in my mind’s eye the logical consequence of expulsion from Pres. There would be family disgrace, the loss of my new friends in Pres, the prospect of a different school most likely under the rule of the cane, and the firm belief that expulsion would lead eventually, but inevitably, to either the unemployment queue or jail. I was nothing if not prone to dramatic visualisations. So I changed.
Jerome kept a close eye on my progress. He recruited me into the school debating society, a good outlet for my performing instinct, and would call me in every few weeks to see how I was getting on in class. They were fatherly chats sprinkled with little nuggets of Jerome wisdom, chief among them the imprecation: ‘To thine own self be true.’ Jerome knew I came from a broken home. He knew I was adrift. But where other headmasters might have seen a troublesome idiot who should have been booted out of school, Jerome went out of his way to help me grow up.
He was a revolutionary figure in Irish education. I cannot imagine another school run by a religious order where the headmaster, a devout Catholic, would institute philosophy classes alongside religious instruction, or where he was happy to allow one of his teachers to ask us to prove to him the evidence for the existence of God. It was done to make us think. Jerome abhorred the idea of faith and belief being taken for granted, as much as he opposed the notion of a society with no spiritual values at all: ‘Think for yourselves, boys.’
In the mid-1970s he decided to build a radio and television studio in the school, a move prompted by his conviction that if we were to succeed in our careers we needed to know how the mass media worked. I had my first broadcasting training in the Pres studio and went from there to appearing with classmates on a local radio schools’ programme. The experience was priceless. I could feel my confidence growing. For the debating matches Jerome would pack a team of four of us, occasionally accompanied by a girlfriend or two, and head off into the distant recesses of the Irish countryside to speak in bleak convents or cavernous boarding schools. Debating taught me to think on my feet and gave me the self-confidence to speak in front of large groups.
It also exposed a chronic lifelong weakness, a tendency to leave everything to the last possible minute (a sure sign I was made for a life in journalism). Time and again I would find myself hiding in the toilet before the debate, frantically scribbling down my notes while my team-mates waited impatiently. I lacked the self-discipline to focus until the clock forced me into action. When time caught up with me I usually managed a creditable performance, occasionally even winning a medal.
Jerome was acutely aware of the school’s image as a place of privilege. He had been raised in poor circumstances himself, and had served in the West Indies at a time when the anticolonial struggle was reaching its crescendo. When he taught us religion Jerome emphasised social justice. At the heart of his message was a simple code: talk without action is meaningless. He became an activist. In 1972 he set up an organisation called SHARE – Schoolboys Harness Aid for Relief of the Elderly – to attack the housing crisis among Cork city’s elderly poor.
When he arrived in Cork, fresh from the missions, Jerome was immediately struck by the wretched living conditions of many residents of the Marsh area. This was just a few hundred yards from the gates of Pres. There were damp and crumbling buildings. Rat-infested tenements. Here the elderly