Crescent College - 19th & Early 20th Centuries

19th & Early 20th Centuries

Following the restoration the Jesuits gradually re-established many of their schools throughout the country, and returned to Limerick at the invitation of the Bishop of Limerick, Dr George Butler. Negotiations between the Order and the Diocese of Limerick were conducted at Rome rather than Ireland, and at the beginning of the 1859 school year the Bishop's school was entrusted to Jesuit Management. This Diocescan College operated initially at premises in Hartstone St, which had until recently been occupied by the Sisters of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, before they purchased Laurel Hill House and established a school for girls there. Paul Connolly, the son of an old and much respected Limerick City family, was the first pupil enrolled, as was the future Bishop of Limerick, Edward O'Dwyer.

The Curriculum included Ancient Classics, Mathematics, modern languages - English and French. German was added later and the school prospectus advertised that boys were to be prepared for the 'University and the Ecclesiastical Colleges; for the Learned Professions; for the Public Service - Civil and Military; and for the department of Mercantile and Commercial Life'.

In 1862 the Jesuits acquired Crescent House and three neighbouring Tontine buildings towards the southern end of the Georgian Crescent. Crescent House was a large city residence recently vacated by a local banking family, the Russells. By tradition Mrs Richard Russell, while in residence, had ordered all the blinds of the house closed so she wouldn't have to look upon John Hogan's statute of Daniel O'Connell, recently erected in the middle of the Crescent. The Georgian house on the Crescent House had a large garden and a number of vacant neighbouring sites, offering great possibilities for expansion. However the Order had paid a large sum for Crescent House and they initially postponed plans for a neigbouring Church until this debt was lessened. It wasn't until 1864 that the execution of plans for the Church commenced and although the garden of Crescent House was large, it wasn't sufficient to house the new Church so the additional properties had to be purchased.

At this time the school suffered a serious setback when the Jesuits quarreled with Dr Butler's successor and the new Bishop removed the Diocescan College from their care, moving it back to Hartstone Street. The Jesuits, however, continued their own School at the newly acquired buildings at the Crescent, which became independent of the Diocese

The school at the Crescent, and the attached Chapel, were dedicated first to St Aloysius Gonzaga, but rededicated to the Sacred Heart in 1868, after the school chapel was enlarged and opened for public worship. This was the first church and school in Ireland dedicated to the Cult of the Sacred Heart, popularised centuries before in France by Claude de la Colombiere SJ. However despite this the Sacred Heart College, like Belvedere College in Dublin, became better recognised by the name of its premises, and was popularly known as Crescent College, or 'the Crescent'. Crescent was a fee paying school catering in the main for the city's growing Catholic middle class, and received no government support. In its early years Sacred Heart College struggled to survive in competition with the Bishop's school, and many students enrolled in the preparatory school were lost to boarding schools as the children became older. However the arrival of a new generation of Jesuit teachers, notably Tom and Peter Finlay ( the latter recorded in Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man) brought a new vigour and prestige in the 1870′s. In 1879 when the results of the first nation-wide Intermediate Examinations were published a Crescent boy, Charles Doyle (later a Judge of the King's Bench), obtained first place in Ireland. This was seen as a triumph for the school, and for all schools that received no subsidy from the government.

Further innovations came in 1874 when the Rector, Fr William Ronan, invited a French Jesuit Colleague, Fr Jean Baptiste René, to establish an Apostolic College at the Crescent House as a seminary for men of little means. This proved a success but overcrowding with the day pupils necessitated that the Apostolic school should relocate to a Boarding School at Mungret with funds provided by a local Catholic nobleman, the Earl of Emly. These schools were again to be joined together when Mungret College SJ was merged again with the Crescent in 1974.

The political controversies of Irish independence came to the Crescent in the early 1920s, and Fr William Hackett established and publically drilled the 'Crescent Volunteers' in 1918 in defiance of the authorities, which was closely observed by the local Constablary. Following the Treaty Fr Hackett was sympathetic to the Republican forces during the civil war, and for his political views he was discretely transferred to Australia in 1922 at the request of the Provisional Government.