It is almost 200 years since Daniel O’Connell laid the foundation stone for the Christian Brothers’ model school in North Richmond Street, Dublin. Heralding its motto “Faith and Fatherland”, O’Connell declared that “education to be suited to this country must be Catholic and Irish in its tone”. An estimated 100,000 people attended this event, which was in effect one of O’Connell’s “monster meetings”. It was 1828, a year before O’Connell’s milestone achievement of Catholic Emancipation, and 26 years after Edmund Ignatius Rice established his religious community of lay men to cater for the educational needs of deprived boys in Waterford, heralding the genesis of the Christian Brothers.

Historian Dáire Keogh makes the observation that “among the urban poor, the Brothers made a landmark contribution in widening the social base of the institutional church. Through their teaching and catechetical instruction, they introduced the poor to the new forms of devotion which became the hallmark of nineteenth-century Catholicism. This effort brought a previously marginalised class within the ranks of the institutional church, which in time became the backbone of the emerging Catholic Ireland ... Rice’s Brothers assisted in the moulding of a distinctively Catholic urban working class, by promoting literacy alongside piety and instilling in........

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