Breaking down the Walls

I have seen many walls in my time. Around houses and estates. Marking fields in the west of Ireland. And even under those in the excavations of the Ceidhe Fields.

I have walked by the ruins of Hadrian's Wall in the north of England, built by the Romans to try and keep the Scots out of the furthest reaches of their empire. I looked again recently at the remains of the Berlin Wall, now an artistically-graffitied tourist attraction.

I have passed through the walls built around Palestine areas in Israel. The builders a nation descended from survivors of their own walled ghettos across Europe — and I wonder if they see the irony?

Walls protect us. They define where we are, and to some extent who we are. They provide us with boundaries. But they also divide.

The lowering of what was, when I was growing up, the 'convent wall', brings that last into local focus. When the Cross and Passion sisters first came to Kilcullen they didn't have a wall. Indeed, they started only with a small donated house. And they quickly became very much part of the community. They visited homes, provided practical and spiritual succour to those who needed it. They set up schools.

The wall came with the building of the actual convent school that was to become the second landmark building in Kilcullen. The church being the first. And that may have been the beginning of the divide.

When I was growing up, that wall was always in my view. I lived in the house across the road from it. I knew some of the nuns. All the children did, because they taught us boys up until Second Class, the girls all the way up to Sixth. But we didn't know them outside of school — they retreated behind that wall every afternoon.

There were others behind it. The girls who were boarded there. They came from all over the country, but we never got to know them either. No more than they got to know Kilcullen. Because that wall kept them in. Apart from the occasional walk out in crocodile two by two, a nun each at front and back. Many years before, an aunt of mine would also have been in that crocodile, and only got home at the end of term — even though she only lived across the wall, where the Hideout is now.

Part of the mystique was lifted when the college became a day school, and eventually went co-educational. So some of my own children went behind the wall on a daily basis. But even in more recent years, when the sisters left, and part of the great building was acquired by KARE, the whole place was a gloom behind the wall’s security.

Except that it wasn't really secure. Walking on the street outside one evening, two local people heard the sound of breaking glass. It turned out a couple of young lads were smashing windows in the former convent.

This triggered the idea that opening up the place might be a better option. And a project which was six years in the planning eventually came to pass. The wall was lowered. A new decorative railing opened up the view of the parkland inside. A landmark building and its pleasant grounds became part of the streetscape, no longer hiding a prison.

And the ghostly memories of a century of people and happenings behind the wall were freed to pass on their way.