Martin Brennan and Education in Athy

Just a few weeks ago as I was leaving my office I met Martin Brennan for the last time. Martin was standing alone on the pavement and I stopped to talk to him as we had always enjoyed chats about what many would regard as the good old times. However, shorn of the romanticism which pervades all our youthful memories, those times were in fact days of hardship for many. Martin was a well known man around town, indeed some might say one of the town’s great characters who helped define and characterise the town of Athy. I enjoyed Martin’s company whenever we met as he always made a point of having a chat about some local matter or persons of interest. Our last conversation was briefer than usual as Martin was not well. His breathing was laboured and he explained with a courageous degree of acceptance why it was so. His death earlier this week brought an end to a life which was notable for strong family ties nurtured by Martin and his sons, Anthony, Timmy, Joseph, Michael, Martin, his late son John Paul and his late wife Bridget. I will miss Martin who joins my classmate Pat Flinter who died a few days earlier. Pat was one of the class of eleven who sat their Leaving Cert. in the local Christian Brothers school in 1960. He was dogged with ill health during his school days and was absent from school for almost six months in the leadup to the exam. Despite that Pat did well in the Leaving Cert., a tribute to his ability, his intelligence and his dedication to study. He reached the highest rung on the ladder of industry when appointed Managing Director of Tegral Metal Forming Limited here in his hometown. It was a remarkable achievement and one which confirmed Pat’s undoubted brilliance as a businessman. Sometime in the early or middle 1950’s four young fellows were ferried in Tosh Doyle’s hackney car to Kildare town to sit Kildare County Council scholarship examinations. The purpose was to get a grant from the County Council to cover secondary school fees. All of us were pupils from the same class in the local CBS where the annual fees were a modest £4 10 shillings. Pat Flinter and Mick Robinson, now in Australia were successful in getting the scholarships while Ted Wynne and myself were the unsuccessful candidates. The first class primary and secondary education facilities which are today to be found in Athy are successors to the foundations opened by the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers in the years following the Great Famine. Both arrived in Athy at a time when there was no legal requirement for young people to attend school and where the “poor school” as it was called and the small private boarding schools of Athy provided little opportunity for the majority of the local children. The education provided by the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers were of immense importance to the town. However, attitudes to education changed ever so slowly and even 100 years after the arrival of the Sisters of Mercy a majority of the young people of the town left school before their 14th birthday. My first day in school was on the 12th of May 1946, the day that I later discovered was also Frank English’s first time in the classroom of St. Joseph’s School. The class comprised 40 or 50 youngsters who were together as classmates for the next 8 or 9 years. The numbers remained constant as we moved to the primary school with the Christian Brothers but as we were preparing to sit the Primary Certificate exam some classmates had left. The slippage became an avalanche as the class transferred to the three room secondary school in St. John’s Lane. By the time we became the Leaving Cert. class of 1959/60 our numbers had fallen to eleven which was the largest ever Leaving Cert. class in that school. Pat Flinter was in that class. About three years ago as many of the Leaving Cert. class of 1960 as were available joined me for a get together for our classmate Seamus Ryan who was on a flying visit from Australia. Sadly since then our numbers have been reduced with the deaths of Kerry O’Sullivan, Teddy Kelly and now Pat Flinter. These classmates of 61 years ago are remembered with fondness and great sadness. Martin Brennan like many of his friends and neighbours had not climbed the iron stairs to the secondary school classrooms. He like so many others had left school at an early age and never had the opportunity to take full advantage of his God given right to complete his education. Martin’s family emigrated to Manchester when he was young. He started work at a young age and on his return to Athy he worked in Minch Nortons. His story and that of Pat Flinter mirror the life stories of so many from Athy. Difficult times in the post World War II years forced many local families to take the emigrant boat and those who remained faced a difficult life which often necessitated young boys and girls being taken out of school to work. The Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy provided the first step in securing educational opportunities for all. The Minster for Education, Donagh O’Malley, advanced another step by ensuring free second level education for all. The days of young teenagers or even pre-teens leaving schools for ill paid jobs is now long gone. However, the memories of those days still linger and are a reminder of how much we in Athy owe to the religious and lay teachers of the past.

Martin Brennan

Martin Brennan is an Athy man whose story mirrors in so many ways the story of so many other folk born in this town in the years preceding and during the Second World War.  His is a story tinged with sadness.  His mother died when Martin was a month short of his second birthday.  She was Esther Territt from Meeting Lane before she married Michael Brennan after he returned from the 1914-18 war.  Martin was the youngest of eight children and he has no memories of his mother and no photograph of the young Athy woman who passed away when she was just 32 years old.  Esther’s brother Michael Territt was killed during the First World War and by a strange coincidence his death plaque bearing the name Michael Joseph Territt is on my desk as I write this article.

Martin’s father was one of the fortunate men who survived the war, even if he was never again to enjoy the good health which was his before he travelled overseas with the British Expeditionary Force.  Michael Brennan suffered for the remaining 42 years of his life from the after effects of gas poisoning. 

Three of the Brennan children died at a young age.  Infant mortality amongst Irish families in the 1930s was very high and it would take another decade or so before advances in medical science and care stemmed the unacceptable loss of young lives.  When Esther Brennan passed away on 10^th October 1938 to join her three infant children who were buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery the rearing of the young Brennan family passed to Martin’s only sister Mona.  She reared the Brennan children after their father emigrated to England.  It would be many years before he returned to Athy and it was with his daughter Mona, then married and living in Pairc Bhride, that he found a home in his final years.  Michael died on 6^th January 1960 and as the old soldier was laid to rest with his wife and infant children his military medals, the only tangible reminder of his connection with the dreadful slaughter of 1914-18 were buried with him. 

Like his father before him Martin on reaching manhood took the emigrant boat to England where he joined three of his brothers.  He worked with McAlpine for many years, traversing the English countryside in common with the Irish labourers who built and rebuilt the highways of that country.  He lived for a while in Lincoln where the ‘Lincolnshire Echo’ of 22^nd July 1961 carried under the headline ‘Irish man rescues mother child’, the story of how Irish labourer Martin Brennan dived into the River Witham to rescue a mother and her four year old son from almost certain drowning.   Martin later returned to Ireland where he worked on the construction of the new Dominican Church which was opened on St. Patrick’s Day 1965.

His brothers Michael, Joseph and Timmy who had emigrated to England before Martin, all eventually took up residence in Lincoln.  Timmy died there in the 1970s, survived by his wife and family, while Michael died last year, aged 84 years.  Joseph still lives in the city of Lincoln where his two brothers have their last resting place.  Lincoln City is also home to a number of other Athy men, including Dom and Jim Kelly and members of the Maher family.

Martin who has been unemployed for many years was widowed last year when his wife Brigid passed away.  I have known Martin for many years and his story in so many ways is a story common to many other men living in Athy.  The loss of his mother at such a young age was a fate shared with many other locals, whether due to death or involuntary emigration.  Many families of the 1940s and beyond never enjoyed the security and comfort of a family group where both parents were present.  Deprivation and hardship was apparently an accepted part of life for many, yet the uneven struggle to survive did not appear to blunt the good nature so common to Athy folk. 

Martin will be 76 years old on 11^th November next, the anniversary of the armistice of 1918, the day his father Michael realised for the first time in four years that he was no longer required to put his life at risk for the ‘cause of small nations’.

There are many instances of local families brought together by marriage where connections already existed by virtue of brothers, sons or fathers who soldiered together through the dreadful years of the 1914-18 war.  A Brennan and a Territt soldiered together in France and Flanders and the survivor Michael Brennan would return to his home town of Athy to marry Esther Territt, whose brother Michael lies buried in Mailly – Maillet Communal Cemetery, Flanders.  Michael Brennan lies in St. Michael’s cemetery with his wife Esther and infant children and the gravestone marking their grave also recalls the memory of their sons Tim and Michael who died in England.