'MAKING A PRIEST' IN IRELAND.

In Ireland, a great aspiration and achievement of many Irish families was the 'making of a priest. Strong farmers and tradespeople, shop owners, teachers or police families were the preferred backgrounds of the potential seminarians.  These families could be relied upon to finance the seven years education before ordination.

For these families, the eldest son would be selected as the heir, and the younger sons would be encouraged to follow up on family links in associated professions.  Daughters could marry or enter a convent; both options held in high social currency.

A priest, a teacher, policeman or merchant were the middle class in Ireland and they held enormous power in a parish.

For families without connection, a son or daughter with a strong vocation could be offered a place with with a Missionary Order for a small contribution.  Our story begins with a family who had a modest holding of 5 acres and the determination of the family to survive on this holding and to make something of their family by 'making a priest' of the eldest son.

The family lived just above sustenance level and to increase their income the woman of the house developed a large clutch of hens to sell eggs and occasional chickens.   The home diet consisted of soda bread, porridge, cabbage, potato bread, and no egg could be spared for the family.  A piece of cured and salted bacon hung from the ceiling and if an unexpected caller arrived, a sliver would be cut and hastily thrown onto the fire to create the smell of cooking meat.  The neighbours had cottoned on to this subterfuge and grudgingly admired their ambition but also felt that they were getting ideas above their station.

The Fair Day dawned and the farmer and his wife headed with their ass and cart loaded with the eggs and chickens for sale.  As they approached the main road, the husband gave a shout, stopped the cart and vomited violently onto the roadway.  A number of neighbours travelling before and behind them, stopped to enquire and offer help to the weakened man as he climbed back up on the cart and all the while his wife fussed and fluttered around the eggs and chickens and bewailing the loss of her husbands breakfast, now splattered on the roadside.  She declared to all and sundry that he'd eaten his usual repast of porridge, soda bread, tea and two boiled eggs with which her neighbour, who had been standing by  the roadside remarked 'Begob Mam, didn't he behave well to holt on to the eggs!'

I never did hear did they manage their ambition but I looked up the costs of 'making a priest' in 1958 and they were as follows;


Capuchins – £1,000 for entire course 

Oblates – £1,500.
Passionists – £250 per annum (no separate accounts kept for students).
Redemptorists – £150 per annum.
St. Patrick’s Foreign Mission Society – £98 per annum (no separate accounts kept for students).
St. Columban’s Foreign Mission Society – £150 per annum.
Maynooth College – £150 per annum. This figure does not include the cost of books, clothes, travel and the many other necessary personal expenses of every student. According to a recent survey, about £900, on the average, is contributed by his parents towards the total cost of a student’s education while in Maynooth College.