Presidents Message
Following the recent AGM I am pleased to have been appointed as President of the Past Pupils Unions for a further year. Unfortunately, as in recent years, the AGM was again poorly attended. We are not alone in this respect as it also seems to be the case with other Past Pupils’ Unions.
Gerry Cassidy (Class of 66) decided to retire from the Committee at the AGM. I would like to thank Gerry, and indeed all the other Committee members, for their work, especially during the challenging Covid years. Two new members were duly elected at the AGM, Gerry Doyle (Class of 73) and Eddie Kelly, who recently retired as Vice Principal of the School. We will work with Eddie to help widen our membership among the more recent past pupils.
With the exception of Gerry, all other Committee members were re-elected for a further year.
Our new Website is now up and running and we hope you find it easy to navigate. The Website has a strong focus on providing access to historical happenings, for example, the Cuimhneachan publication and the School Archive Project. If you have not done so previously, I would strongly urge you to access both items as they provide a wonderful background to the earlier activities of the school and the surrounding areas, including in particular, our past pupil’s involvement in both the 1916 Rising and the First World War.
Current news will still in the first instance be distributed through our Blog (Link below). We continue to be grateful for the work Jim Conway does in maintaining the Blog and, of course, to John Murray who provides the photos.
As members will be aware, the PPU has, in recent years, supported the school with various grants or awards towards the cost of students’ education. Thanks to the ongoing support of our members and to some very generous donations, the PPU was able to make a number of awards at the start of the last academic year. The 2023 awards were presented by fellow committee member Pat Neill and myself to four students, two in first year and two in fifth year, who were nominated by the Principal and her colleagues. We will be making similar awards later this year and I hope with continued support from our members that we will be able to continue these awards in future years.
The Committee has spent time over the last year considering the future of the PPU. Our membership has been declining for some years and unless we can attract more new members our ability to support the School will be severely diminished. One way we feel we can help do this is to attract more recent past pupils to join our Committee, and we are delighted that Eddie will help with this work. We are especially interested in those who left the School after 1980; hopefully, we can attract some past pupils who attended since the school went Co-Ed. We would encourage as many past pupils as possible to contact the PPU and seek out colleagues from their own schooldays at the ”Row”. From experience, it is well worth the effort.
To mark 50 years since leaving the “Row” my own Class of 1973 made a memorable visit to the school in October of last year. It was a wonderful experience, and I would strongly urge any class marking a major anniversary to make a similar visit. With reasonable notice the school will be happy to facilitate the group.
Our Row Person of the Year, Gerry Keenan, also followed the tradition of making a visit to the school. Gerry spoke about how his own career had developed from his time at the “Row” and provided some very helpful advice to those pupils leaving the school in the next few years. The feedback indicates that his comments were very well received and appreciated.
Finally, I would like on behalf of the Past Pupils Union to send our best wishes to those students sitting their exams in the coming weeks.
Dan Ferrari
President
