PRIOR to teaching at the old Kilbaha national school in the 1950s, Kitty Garvey had never set foot in Clare’s most westerly community. In the intervening six decades, the Miltown Malbay woman has grown to know and love Kilbaha and the school, where she served as principal from 1968 until 1993.

On Friday, the new school will mark its 50th anniversary, although records show the old school, which is now Halla Eoin, was established in the early 1870s.

“I hadn’t heard of it even,” Kitty said of her knowledge of Kilbaha prior to securing a teaching post there. Not yet 20, she stayed with a local family during her early years teaching at St Cuan’s National School, Kilbaha.

“I lodged with Paddy Keating, his wife Bridget and family. It was a super experience. The house was two miles from the primary school so I was able to walk or cycle, morning and evening,” she reminisced.

“I came to the greatest community on earth. The people were only wonderful. They were so friendly, welcoming, kind, religious and co-operative. I enjoyed every moment of my life in Kilbaha. I learned as I went along and I got to know almost everyone,” Kitty added.
When a lighthouse keeper from Galway was posted to Loop Head Lighthouse, Kitty was soon in the know. Teaching in the local school, she got to hear these things.

“We had a postman called ‘Dike’ McInerney. He came to school one day and he said ‘do you know there’s a new fella up at the lighthouse?’ I said ‘what’s his name?’ He said his name was Brendan Garvey,” Kitty recounted.

That was the start of it. Kitty was invited to a dance at the lighthouse.

“I thought to myself, ‘I won’t be bothered going’ because we had to cycle three-and-a-half miles to get there. But one of my friends said ‘ah we’ll go and we’ll see what the new fella is like’. So we went anyway and the dance was in one house. The men were in a room and they had the light out. They were looking out at the ladies, sitting around. That’s how it was in those days. Then they’d pop out and they’d ask you to dance a waltz. The girls sat down until they were asked to dance,” she recalls.

It didn’t take the new lighthouse keeper long to make his move and soon after that first dance, he made contact with Kitty.

“I got a letter at the school some days afterwards wondering if he could meet me. So I said ‘I don’t know you so I can’t meet you’. He was a Galway man, you see. But I did say I might meet him sometime at a dance in Carrigaholt. I gave him a little hope,” Kitty laughed, before further outlining her tactical approach.

“We were reared to play hard to get,” she revealed. “Anyway, I met him on December 8 at a dance in Carrigaholt. He was a great dancer. If you were a good dancer in those times it was great because all you wanted to do was dance. You weren’t thinking of marriage or anything like that. That’s all we did in our spare time. We danced and danced. I married him anyway, in the end.”

Kitty and Brendan were married in Kilkee on September 5, 1959 and they borrowed Brendan’s father’s car for their week-long honeymoon in Donegal. The following June, having lived in Kilkee for a while, they moved into Loop Head Lighthouse, where electricity, the telephone and an annual supply of seven tonnes of coal were all free.

“You mention it, everything was free, except what we had to eat. What we were eating was very healthy food because Brendan used to say ‘I’ll go down and fish for the tea’. He’d arrive back from Ross [Bay] with mackerel. Then we had our own cow for milk, hens for eggs and a back garden. We managed to save money to buy a brand new car, AIE 770, an Anglia with a cutaway back,” Kitty said.

Three of the couple’s five children were born while the family lived at the lighthouse.

“Life was hectic. No washing machines or no home helps. Brendan would be babysitting at night. He’d be up doing his watch and babies would be crying. We reared them very simply. We had four bedrooms upstairs and we could have a baby in each room so that they wouldn’t wake each other. They were very healthy and it was a lovely place to bring up children,” Kitty reflected.

Having children didn’t unduly interrupt Kitty’s teaching career. “In those days you couldn’t take time off. You were out of school for two months and if you weren’t back in two months, a very poor view would be taken of you,” Kitty said, noting this approach applied to mothers on maternity leave.

Following the death of Tom Keating, the then principal, Kitty was appointed to the post in his place, even though she had reservations.

“The manager of the school at that time was always the parish priest. He’d use his own discretion and he decided that I should be the principal.

“But I didn’t think so at that time because I was expecting my fifth child in August and I’d have to be back at school in September. It was a mighty challenge but reluctantly I accepted the position,” Kitty said of her appointment in 1968.

Sometimes, her husband was posted to other lighthouses around Ireland, leaving Kitty with double the workload at home, although she had a nanny to help out. They had now bought a plot of land and built their own house in Newtown, whey they still live.

“I needed that support because my husband was away. He would be away for six weeks. You had to be a very strong woman to live that life. You had to be a great decision maker, to be strict and to be everything that a husband and wife together would be. You had to manage the finances and you had to do everything as if you were a widow,” she said.

These days, Mary P Lynch is St Cuan’s National School principal. Kitty is delighted at this turn of events, as she taught Mary at primary school.

“I’d always say ‘Mary will get places’. Mary was confident and she was good at her music,” Kitty remembers fondly, decades of memories flooding her thoughts.

Sixty years ago, Kitty knew nothing about Kilbaha. Now she is central to the fabric of the community and it is part of who she is.

 

50th anniversary celebrations planned

ON Friday at 7.30pm, St Cuan’s National School, Kilbaha will mark the new school’s 50th anniversary.
The school opened in 1962 when Tom Keating was principal. Mary P Lynch is the current principal of the 39-pupil school and is a past pupil. When Kitty Garvey retired in 1993, Mary was appointed to the assistant teacher’s post, while Mary Roche was principal until her retirement in 2009.

“I was in second class when Mary (Roche) came to the school so she actually taught me for four months before I went into Kitty’s room,” Mary said.

With many rural schools experiencing low attendance figures, Mary P Lynch is content with the pupil figures at the school in 2012.

“For a rural school, 39 is pretty good. Our numbers are going to stay roughly around that figure for the next couple of years.

“We also have a shared resource teacher and a shared learning support teacher. We have a special needs assistant and we also have a secretary in the school,” Mary explained, adding that she appreciates the help she gets from parents.

“Our parents are just wonderful. They are just amazing. I just have to click my fingers and they come in,” she explained.

Asked if this could be because the parents might be afraid of Mary, she didn’t rule that possibility out. “There could be that in it,” she laughed.

Ciana Callanan teaches the senior classes at St Cuan’s. Now in her third year teaching at the school, Ciana wasn’t initially certain where Kilbaha was, when she was heading there for an interview.

“First of all I thought Kilbaha was just outside Ennis. So I rang one of my friends from Kilrush, who I went to college with. She said I’d be an hour heading to Kilrush and another good half hour or 40 minutes going back,” Ciana laughed, recalling that she was two hours early for her interview.

Adjusting to teaching four classes in the one room, straight out of college, was an eye opener.

“I had never experienced a multi-class setting before. The only knowledge I had was two classes in a room, not four. But I just got on with it. I know the place and I know the people now and I love it here,” the Galway girl said.

This Friday’s celebrations will include a mass with Fr Michael Casey and music provided by Patrick Roche, who is a past pupil.