St. Enda's School - Move To Rathfarnham

Move To Rathfarnham

St. Enda's taught many of the classes in Irish, and particularly stressed the arts and dramatics. Everything was given an Irish approach. After two years the school was doing quite well, all things considered. At this point, when most people would work on more fully establishing the school and perhaps working on an endowment, Pearse instead got more ambitious. Thrilled with his creation, and concerned that Cullenswood House was not a location that did St. Enda's justice, Pearse found what he believed to be the perfect home for the school. The Hermitage in Rathfarnham, substantially further from Dublin than Cullenswood House, caught his imagination and he decided that the school would have to move there. The substantial extra expenses involved did not deter him, nor was anything likely to, for the Hermitage, in addition to having a majestic pastoral setting, had a connection with one of his personal heroes, Robert Emmet, an Irish martyr and hero of Pearse's. It was on the same grounds that he had courted his love Sarah Curran, who had lived nearby and whose father did not look kindly on young Emmet, forcing them to the nearby grounds of the nearby Hermitage for their trysts. In addition, the school's namesake, St. Enda of Aran, had similarly left his life to teach a devoted group of students in the secluded Aran Islands, much as Pearse was now to do. In 1910 St. Enda's opened its doors at the Hermitage.

The Hermitage, while perfect for Pearse's idyllic image of what he had hoped to achieve, predictably proved to be a financial disaster. The extra distance made it less practical for the day school boys, forcing many of them to drop out, with not enough making the switch to boarders. In addition to this school, Pearse had decided to use Cullenswood House to establish a similar school for girls, St. Ita's. With bankruptcy looming Pearse was forced to look to the United States for further funding. A lecture tour gave him some good contacts among the exiled Fenians who would prove to play a large part in Ireland's near political future, but the money he raised only kept the school barely in solvency.