Small schools are big news. Google the phrase and you’ll find impassioned discussions on the topic from all sorts of places: Shropshire, Ontario, Portugal, Finland. Two other words, sadly, also tend to feature in these discourses: “rural” and “closure”.
Still, it appears that nothing galvanises a community like the threat, usually from politicians in a distant city, to close a local primary school. Here in Ireland we’ve had many such battles in recent years, one of the most celebrated being that of Scoil Naomh Gobnait in Dún Chaoin, Co Kerry.
The school was closed in 1970 by a Fianna Fáil government, prompting a campaign of protest that included a march from Dún Chaoin to Dublin. A Fine Gael-Labour coalition reopened the doors in 1973, but when our photo was taken in early 1995, sabres were clearly being rattled on the Dingle Peninsula once again.
“Overall the future for Dún Chaoin seems bleak because of the falling pupil numbers,” the caption declares.
Happily the school is still in operation today and going from strength to strength with, presumably, as lively and varied a bunch of pupils as those shown in our photo (see original below).
What did Pat Langan say to the children and their teachers, to elicit this range of responses? The child at the front, his head at a birdlike angle; the boy on the far left, grinning to beat the band, while just behind him, the lad in the stripy jumper is still thinking hard; to his left, the redhead – he has to be a redhead, surely – patting the noggin of the girl in front; the thumbs-up from the dude near the back; and so it goes, the energy rippling around the image equivalent to at least two double espressos.
Behind them sits the school building, sober and quiet, waiting for classes to resume. And if you look to the right and around the back, you get a glimpse of the dramatic landscape beyond. If our society had any sense, we’d be opening schools in such places – not trying to close them.
