Innovative and passionate principal who helped many, many children
LYING between Clonmel and Fethard is the parish of Lisronagh and this is where Tom Hunt was born in 1943. Until recently, he was the much-loved principal of Scoil Aireagail, Ballyhale.
"Well, I don't know if everyone would agree with that," says Tom, smiling and lifting a glass of Coke over his long, white beard. "I've always had the beard; it wasn't always white though. A student showed me a picture of myself at a Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) conference back in the 1980s and my beard wasn't white then. 'Look', I said to her, 'Look what ye've done to me!', he says laughing.
Tom started teaching in secondary schools in England in 1969, then moved back to Ireland and taught in Kilkenny City VEC until moving to Ballyhale VEC, where he stayed for 28 years, spending 14 of them as principal.
"I hated school," he says emphatically, "the brutality was horrendous. I was damaged by it. I was good at sport and in all the years I spent at school, I had one positive comment made to me by a teacher. He couldn't even say it out loud; he whispered it to me and it was to compliment me on a goal I had scored. I went to England at 17 and worked on building sites. I was hurt, damaged and confused. My sister, Lavinia, went to UCD and became a teacher and she was always on at me to go to college and use my intelligence. In my final report from my last school, the teacher wrote, "Dear Mrs Hunt, Your son is better suited to digging drains and the sooner you send him to said occupation, the better." I realised I was digging drains and needed to get out of there. I applied for a few universities in England and here and the only one that wrote back and encouraged me was Trinity College. They sent me the work I would have to do to pass their Matriculation Exam and I did it and got in. I didn't even know there was a ban on Catholics going to Trinity; I just went. That ban was never imposed by Trinity you know, that came from Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. Any other Catholics I met in Trinity had got a dispensation to go there."
After Trinity, came teaching in London, where Tom met his wife, Daphne, from Dublin, who was training to be a nurse.
"We got married and then when Daphne was pregnant we decided to put our roots down in Ireland," says Tom. "I applied to lots of schools but I think they thought I was from outer space. I had been teaching in England when the Comprehensive System was being introduced. I loved it but they weren't really into it here. Anyway, the day Daphne went into labour, I had an interview for Kilkenny VEC. She told me to go, so I dropped her at the hospital and drove down here. The principal of the school then was Sen Duignan; lovely man. They offered me the job and we moved down with the baby, Orlagh, and I started the following Monday. That was in 1972 and I taught in the City VEC until 1980. I had a great time there. We catered for all the aspirations of young people and we had students going on to University and winning All Ireland Drama competitions. 'The Tech Tatler' won the Irish Times Best School Magazine Award and we had a vibrant Students Union. The students had a voice and they were encouraged to be a part of their education."
During his time on building sites in England, Tom observed the men around him.
"I met an awful lot of Irish people who were hurt, damaged and angry; invariably the social and educational structures had been very unkind to them. It was clear to me that it could be different and it should be different. I met many people with poor reading skills and they were intelligent people in every way. There was one man in particular from West Cork whom I worked with for years before I realised he couldn't read. I saw the panic and the embarrassment of that man at times on the site and I thought, it doesn't have to be like that. I trained as a remedial teacher in 1973 to meet the needs of some of the students. It was only the second year of the remedial training in Ireland. There was a boy in my class when I first started teaching and he was a deaf mute. I couldn't believe there was a boy who couldn't hear or speak just allowed to go through the system without specialist help. I thought, 'I'll fix that.' I taught him and he got into the National College of Art & Design and became a teacher. Towards the end of my teaching life, there was another boy who was severely dyslexic. He used to hate Fridays because he would have a spelling test every Friday and he dreaded it. He did his Junior Cert, his Leaving Cert, got a first-class Honours Degree in Forensic Science, was invited back to do a PhD but turned it down because he had been accepted to do Medicine in a university in England. I see those two lads as the bookends of my life as a teacher."
As well as responding to the needs of students, Tom also got involved in the TUI and was elected to the executive in 1976, appointed vice-president in 1978 and president in 1981.
"I had a realisation that maybe if I had spoken out in the '50s and '60s, it may have been helpful for me and for others but nobody spoke about things then," says Tom. "In the '80s, we had broken free of that culture of silence and we needed spokespersons for equality of educational opportunities. When this government announced the education cuts in the last budget, I went back to my speech which I gave outside the Dil at the teachers' strike in January 1982, where I talked about the education cuts then as a 'blight on the generation' and I would repeat that now. When times are good, we hear all this political rhetoric about our great education system; then when we have economic problems, we get cutbacks. Each year in education is a once-off; it's not a dress rehearsal. If you cut back on services to students now, you will never restore that. It depresses me. It's so wrong. If allowed to go unchallenged, society will pay a huge price later; you'll have social exclusion and all that flows from that."
The talk turns to his years in Ballyhale and Tom smiles.
"I had a wonderful time in Ballyhale. I loved the people there and the support I had from parents. They supported the school throughout the '80s when we were working and learning in third-world conditions with prefabs all over the grounds. The parents had a strong conviction that their school would not be taken from them, it wouldn't be closed; they understood that a school is not just a building. The people in Carrickshock, Mullinavat, Ballyhale, Newmarket, Stoneyford, Kells, have a great sense of themselves and a great sense of place. We went on to have two students go to Oxford University and three students win United World Colleges Scholarships to Pearson College in Canada. There's a boat in the South seas somewhere called the 'Scoil Aireagail'. The students raised money to buy it after the Tsunami. There's an orphanage in Belarus which has received five ambulances and about 250,000 euro worth of food and supplies over the last 15 years. We never told the students they couldn't; we said, 'Let's see how we can make this happen'. The most important thing to me was that they would leave school as a whole person and value who they are whoever they are. The most important thing is self-worth. I tried to give them that and I'd say I failed at it every day but that would make me go back every day and keep trying."
While we are talking, a former student comes over to say hello. After smiles and handshakes, Tom's brow furrows but he finds the man's name having searched back through the years and the thousands of eager faces.
The inscriptions on cards from former students say it all.
'Thanks for listening.' 'Thanks for opening doors for me that I never thought possible.'
"I found it very difficult to retire, very difficult to say goodbye to the students" says Tom. "It's like that Bob Dylan song, 'Restless Farewell',
'And the corner sign, says it's closing time
So I'll bid farewell and be down the road.'
"Scoil Aireagail will be fifty years in existence this year. We should have a reunion. Maybe we should have a ball."
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Tuesday 22 May 2012
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