The Infant School
In 1855 the Fever Hospital closed. The building was granted by Lord Cork to the Sisters of Mercy to use as an Industrial and Infants’ School on the condition that if ever need again as a fever hospital it would be returned to the authorities. In setting up the Industrial School the Sisters were answering the need for employment. Between 60 to 80 girls and women were employed. Many kinds of work were tried but none were as profitable or as quickly learned as the crochet. A qualified lace-maker was employed to teach the craft. Crochet was very fashionable at the time. The export trade was with America. The school worked steadily until trade was interrupted by the American Civil War in 1861. Substitutes for the crochet were tried but proved unprofitable.
As the number of infants increased the Industrial School was gradually phased out and the most of the building was used as the Infants’ School. In 1965 the old Fever Hospital was condemned and a new Infants’ School was built on a new site which was called St. Joseph’s Infants’ School. It is a thriving school still in operation today under lay management. The Sisters of Mercy no longer work there.
St. Anne’s Primary School Charleville
In 1836 the Sisters of Mercy were invited to come to Charleville to look after the education of the young girls of the town by the then parish priest Very Rev. Thomas Croke. There was a new National School on the old Limerick Road, which was then attended by between four and five hundred boys and girls. This building now houses the Schoolyard Theatre.
The Sisters visited the school daily and also gave religious instruction to the pupils. Gradually they began to teach full time and within a year they were given full charge of the school.
The girl’s school was on the ground floor and the Sisters taught there for over a hundred years until 1941. During that time they made several improvements, including new floors, a cookery kitchen, partitions and central heating.
More rooms were needed but there was no land available for building near the school. This being the case the Sisters had purchased a filed from the Ball family in Smith’s Land, beside the convent garden. They leased the field to the Department of Education as a site for a new school.
The foundation stone of the new school was laid in June 1939 and St. Anne’s School was opened two years later in 1941. Girls from second to sixth were enrolled in the school, which had six classrooms, a cookery kitchen and a principal’s office. There was a cloakroom and toilets at each end of the school.
The majority of the pupils were poor as half of the population lived in the lane ways off the Main Street until the 1950s and often the parents couldn’t afford books or clothes for the children and the Sisters provided them.
In the evening the Sisters visited the homes of the pupils and witnessed the poverty at first hand and so the custom developed of providing hot tea or cocoa and bread and jam, to the pupils at lunch time.
In the 1950s and 1960s the Sisters taught cookery, needlework and housekeeping skills to past pupils in the school at night. This was to prepare them for employment.
Compulsory school leaving age was fourteen and many girls who couldn’t afford to go to secondary school stayed on in 7th and 8th class. The Sisters prepared many girls to go and train as nurses in England and they often provided uniforms and books for them.
Over the decades the Sisters paid for the upkeep and repairs to St. Anne’s until Boards of Management were appointed in 1970s. The first lay teacher, Mary O’Connor, was appointed in the 1970s and as the Sisters retired they were replaced by more lay teachers.
The Sisters were still principals of the school until 2001 the first lay principal of St. Anne’s School was appointed.
At the end of August 2015 the last Mercy Sister to teach in the school retired thus bringing to an end the 179 years of involvement in education provided by the Sisters of the Mercy Order in Charleville.
Southern Province 