Eamonn McCann: Losing My Religion

On my first day at St. Columb’s College in Derry, all us new boys were gathered together for what would now be called an induction session. A plump priest pointed at each of us in turn, desk by desk, row by row. “What’s your name and where do you come from?”

“Finbar O’Kane from Garvagh,” “John Patton from the Waterside,” “Lawrence Murphy from Newtownbutler,” “Eamonn McCann from Rossville Street.”

“Ah,” he responded, “That’s where yeez wash once a week.”

A titter ran across the classroom. Everyone was 11 years old and knew what was expected of them.

I remember it vividly. When I think on it, I still feel the sting. But it wasn’t a personal insult. Just letting me know where I and the likes of me stood.

I’d made it into St. Columb’s by passing the “11-Plus” – a key plot-point in the education of a generation of working-class Northerners. The exam had been instituted by the post-war Labour Government’s 1947 Education Act. (Or 1948 Act in the North: the Unionist Government had to steel itself for a year before conceding that the hoi polloi might enter the hallowed halls of junior academia.

Years later, I was told by John Taylor, soon to be a Unionist MP, now Lord something or other, that this dilution of the student community had been a bad mistake, giving Bogsiders and their ilk ideas above their station, leading on to civil rights tumult and all manner of other outrages. Truth to tell, he had a point.

A couple of years later, we reached senior level. The head teacher – Fr. Anthony McFeely, later bishop of Raphoe, addressed our cohort. The primary purpose of St. Columb’s was to provide a stream of recruits to the priesthood.

Each of us had a choice between learning French or Ancient Greek. Boys with ambition to be priests should choose Ancient Greek. Filled with a certain self-destructive mischievousness – I am not sure I’ve lost it - I called out, “Ancient Greek.”

Sitting beside me was Eddie Mahon from Gleneely in Donegal. “We’ll get an easier time if we do the Greek,” I whispered. Eddie shot up his hand. “I’ll do Ancient Greek, too.”

Thus it was that Eddie, one of the best footballers in the college, later net-minder for Derry City, Athlone Town and Dundalk, became the only Ancient Greek-speaking goalkeeper in League of Ireland history. Ancient Greek, I think now, was the better option. Although I have long ago lost it, I was once able to read in the original, dictionary at the elbow, finger tracing the lines, Xenophon’s Anabasis, Aristophanes, Plato.

This, on the face of it, didn’t help me much later, not in practical terms. But, along with Latin, it provided a conduit back to the beginnings of Western civilisation.

(The first thing ever measured was music. Pythagoras, in the 6th century BC, long before the heyday of Athens, discovered that if the relative length of two taut strings is 2:3, the pitch of the sound when the strings are twanged produces one of the basic chords, a fifth. Different ratio, different chord. Every guitarist tuning their instrument uses this insight, even if knowing nothing of Pythagoras. Music is the basis of all Western mathematics, and therefore of all Western science. Think about this the next time you listen to Hendrix.)

So I did the senior certificate and arrived at Queens. The senior certificate, too, was rooted in the education acts of the 1940s. These had created an educational obstacle course which, if you could negotiate it, opened the way towards university - and Catholics had no handicap. That was a big thing at the time.

I wasn’t the first from our street to scramble on board. upwards. Paddy Joe Doherty from up beside the cattle-market had gone off two or three years earlier. There were those in the area who reckoned no good would come of this. Paddy Joe might fall in with the wrong crowd, “lose his faith.”

We hadn’t escaped from the protection of the Church. The university chaplin, Fr. (later Cardinal) Daly decreed that any Catholic student taking psychology had to take Moral Philosophy too - so as to counter the bad influence of secularists. Moral Philosophy was based on the formidable works of Thomas Aquinas, a 12th century Italian Dominican monk, one of the intellectual giants of Western thought. He argued that reason and faith could not be incompatible because both came from God.

We were expected to continue to study in an atmosphere of incense. When I refused to follow this instruction, Fr. Daly wrote to my parents to alert them that I fallen in with some of the most pernicious elements at Queens and seemed set on the road to perdition.

I took my chances with the devil and embraced the religion of humanism, Labour, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, homosexual law reform and anti-monarchism. My first-ever “proper” march was as part of a Queen’s contingent on a three-day trek from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire to Trafalgar Square, where I managed to get myself arrested. It was good grounding for the future.

For all its chaos, contradictions, drunkenness and light-headed rampage, I reckon, taking all with all, it was a good education for its time. It did me no harm. So I like to think. I enjoyed myself enormously.

And I have believed ever since that “The Wrong Crowd” would be a great name for a band, but nobody’s ever taken me up on it.