Father John Heffernan, former headmaster of Newbridge College, has died.
Some of the obituaries have floundered a bit in evoking the spirit of the man.
So I thought I'd have a go.
He was headmaster of Newbridge during the golden era, that is to say when I was there as a student between 1978 and 1983.
He was headmaster for many years before and after that too but those periods are of little interest to scholars of pathos, bathos, and high farce.
Contrary to reports he was not nicknamed Johnno. Nor even Hef, which would have been a good one. To thousands of successive generations of boys who knew him, he was referred to as Nana.
This was not because he reminded kids of their bright eyed kindly grandmothers but because when he was berating recalcitrant students, his eloquent tirades supposedly blurred in our ears to sound like: "Na, na, na, nya, na, na, nya nya na na na, nya, na, na, na, na, na na na nanana nana nana nana."
He was indeed undoubtedly eloquent, a prince of preachers, but his tongue lashings did kind of sound like this.
It wasn't so bad.
If you shut your eyes you could enter into a sort of Zen like Nirvana state and let it all wash over you, a sensation not all that different from meditation.
I never remember him slapping anyone.
Father Heffernan was the prime exemplar of the headmaster and priest as Chief Executive.
There was no room or playing field or precinct or praying area in Newbridge College or I daresay anywhere else on earth, in which he feared to enter or in which once he had entered it, he wasn't instantly in charge of, with the possible exception of his encounters with the Deity.
I know of few occasions on which he appeared to back down or defer in any confrontation.
One such occasion did occur when my parents discovered a week before the beginning of term in the dulcet Summer of 1978 (a fairly carefree Summer in the Healy household otherwise) that the school had no record I was ever registered to attend there and that I would therefore be unable to commence my secondary school education.
They insisted they had completed all the paperwork and formalities. The College said they had done no such thing and that no application or paperwork had been received. I know who I believed.
My mother went in to bat.
At a meeting in his office, Father Heffernan informed her that I hadn't been registered and therefore was not entitled and would not under any circumstances be attending Newbridge College.
My mother insisted that I had been registered.
The headmaster remained firm.
My mother reminded him that three of my brothers were already attending the school.
At this Father Heffernan looked a bit distant, but did not seem to soften as much as you might expect.
Finally he decided to bring the meeting to a close.
"My hands are tied," he said. "Your son cannot attend this school. That's all there is to it. I'm sorry but you will just have to make alternative arrangements. What are you going to do Mrs Healy?"
Mrs Healy answered as she stood and collected up her coat: "I'm going to talk to the Provincial head of the Dominican Order. Then I'm going to talk to the Bishop. Then I'm going to talk to the Cardinal. Then I'm going to talk to the Pope."
Father Heffernan sighed.
"James can start on Monday," he said.
He managed his school as he made all his decisions, from the front. The buck stopped and started with him.
He seemed to have an ability to be everywhere at once.
He moved in our midst in an aura of assured authority. Some of us had a childish resentment of him which was for reasons that weren't coherent. He incarnated rules. We thought we didn't like rules. So we thought we didn't like him.
One day when a group of kids were cruelly teasing a teacher (seriously though) about having to kowtow to Father Heffernan simply because Father Heffernan was top priest, I was astonished as were the other kids when the teacher informed us that Father Heffernan didn't inherit his job as Headmaster by right of being top Dominican in the College but that the community of Dominicans actually elected him. Year in year out. And kept electing him. For decades. They actually liked him.
At the time I thought they must have been bonkers in the nut but I see it differently now.
He led from the front, loved rugby and dreamed that his rough hewn bog hole of a school crammed with the barbarous proles of Leinster was the playing fields of Eton stuffed with gentlemanly exponents of derring do and noblesse oblige.
In 1981, a weak kneed softy whom I shan't name for fear of embarassing myself, had lobbied him on the endemic bullying situation in the school.
I'd said: "I hope I would never kill myself. Because of Jesus I think I would always choose to live. To be honest, I don't think anyone else is about to kill themselves either. But if it got any worse, I'd say you'd have a body count alright."
This rhetorical flourish apparently got people's attention and was much talked about among the staff.
Father Heffernan was as good as his word. Within days he spoke to every class in the place formally on the issue. He couldn't quite bring himself to say the word bullying but he did make a passionate appeal against it.
"We want you to be men," he exclaimed. "Let's get away from this intimidation thing. This Triad stuff. We don't need that. It's not who we are."
Well it was certainly who about a hundred members of the Newbridge College Hitler Youth were but never mind that.
He also instituted overnight a procedure which he claimed to have been a part of the school tradition for a hundred years whereby a child being bullied could challenge his tormentor to go in the ring for a boxing match, complete with audience, bell, rounds, gloves and referee.
I remember thinking this was quite a quaint way to address the bullying problem and that he had somehow with the best of intentions, completely missed the point.
I didn't for a second think that giving the bullies a licence to marmalise me in the ring would represent any real improvement on my situation.
For all his managerial practicality and noblesse oblige madness, Father Heffernan could at the drop of a softy, I mean hat, speak with hearty and sincere enthuasiasm about God.
I remember him talking about Jesus' teaching on brotherly love: "You know there's a contradiction there with the way we psych ourselves up on the rugby field. I don't think you can ever get round that. You're always going to face that contradiction and you just have to accept it."
Hilarious no.
As near as I can figure out he was telling the rugby players among us that he didn't expect them to stop psyching themselves up for something so arcane as the gospel but to be aware of the paradox.
Soon after I started at Newbridge, Father Heffernan found a class of us without a teacher who had not shown up that day.
There was a different teacher for every class and classes were scheduled to run for forty minutes at a time.
He stepped into the room, enquired as to where the teacher was, and on hearing that he hadn't shown up, took the class himself, speaking about the Trinity, the idea that God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in one God, and presenting to our twelve year old minds, the ancient mystery as freshly as though he'd just heard about it himself, pausing for questions and discussion but never over the forty minutes tiring of the topic or running out of steam.
Among his innovations at Newbridge College was the introduction of the school uniform, a nifty little identifier of class distinctions with grey trews, grey shirt and grey jumper imaginatively topped off with anything else grey you could find.
When, at an assembly of the entire school, he announced his decision to introduce the uniform I stood up and spoke against the idea.
"Students at Newbridge College are not popular in Newbridge town," I said, understating the matter considerably. "There is a division. If you introduce a uniform, you will be putting a target on our backs. People will get beaten up."
Father Heffernan let me speak, resisted the urge to say "you're the kid getting beaten up anyway," and dismissed the intellectual component of my concerns with chief executiverly elan.
"I don't think that will happen," he said smoothly. "This school is no more unpopular than any other."
How I laughed and laughed and laughed when within months the first great brawl between newly uniformed Newbridge College boys and yobs from Newbridge town made the courts, with a photograph in the newspapers of a grim faced Father Heffernan beside four of his students natty in their grey uniforms, outside Court House Number One on the day a judge found the College boys guilty of affray in their righteous tussle with some of the lowest low life Newbridge town ever produced.
No disrespect to any yobs reading this but these guys were rancid.
Incidentally the yobs had lost the street fight because we had a kid called Mick Hughes on our side who was a nice kid but a wrecking machine. He currently works in Dublin Airport on the security side of things and if the peaceloving Muslims of Al Qaeda ever attack Dublin Airport when Mick Hughes is on duty, my concerns would be entirely for the safety of the terrorists. The Newbridge town yobs may have lost the fight with the Newbridge College boys but they won the court case because in Court House Number One they had Judge Mortimer Baines, a liberal left wing judge, on their side. (Baines jurisprudence: "Those poor working class children are being oppressed by those snotty privileged little Lord Fauntleroys in their awful styleless uniforms. Well the Fauntleroys are not going to win today. Let's redistribute some wealth. I'll show these rich kids and their Catholic Church who's boss. Oppressors of the masses indeed, etc etc.")
The moral of this story gentle travellers of the internet, is that I'm never wrong about anything.
Father Heffernan knew all his students by name, and over the years there came passing through his school a goodly passle of my characterful relatives, most of whom had even been properly legally registered to attend the place.
Notable among these was my rock star cousin Graham. I say rock star in the sense that he was phenomenally popular with the student body in our own school who refused to believe he was related to me (the idiots had no awareness that the nerd gene is recessive) and even more popular with girls from adjoining schools.
When he was about 15, he and a girl from Kilcullen Convent began a romance.
It was a literary romance really.
They didn't actually do anything.
Just wrote fairly racy letters to one another about what they'd like to do.
She'd write to him every day and send the letters to Newbridge College where Graham was boarding.
He'd write letters to her by return and send them care of Kilcullen Convent.
This went on for a few weeks.
Graham's English teacher would have been astounded by his output in the epistolatory form.
Eventually a problem arose.
A week went by with no daily letter for Graham.
Somewhat chagrined he went home at the weekend and met up with Miss Kilcullen Convent.
"Why have you stopped writing to me?" she said.
"Why have you stopped writing to me?" said Graham.
"I have been writing," she said. "Didn't you get my letters?"
"No," he answered. "I didn't get any this week."
"Well I sent them," she said. "Every day."
A dark presentiment crossed Graham's mind.
On Sunday evening, he returned to the school and betook himself to Father Heffernan's office.
"Have you got letters of mine," he demanded.
Father Heffernan sat back in his chair.
"Now listen young man," he said sternly. "There are things in those letters that are not proper for your stage of life. They're not appropriate topics for a young man to be discussing with a young lady. Do you understand?"
Graham understood.
Not only had Father Heffernan confiscated the letters.
He'd read them.
"Give me back my letters," roared Graham, "you evil bastard."
He wasn't expelled.
Father Heffernan had hidden depths of compassion and a robust inner confidence. He did not need to vindicate himself at the expense of callow youth.
Also the fact that Graham's parents were rich might have had something to do with it.
I know what I think.
In any case, Graham and Miss Kilcullen Convent soon broke up their letter writing fantasy masquerading as a relationship, due to the interception of their letters which had attenuated the thrill of loving each other forever somewhat.
Father Heffernan was not always appreciated for some of the innovations he sought to introduce.
In the late 1970s he attempted to install two way microphones throughout the College as a security measure. This would have enabled him to contribute improptu remarks to classes and, as the teachers saw it, to listen in.
Staff and their union the Association of Secondary School Teachers in Ireland rebelled against the notion and with hurtful remarks comparing Father Heffernan to President Richard Nixon decisively defeated the measure.
That's the only other time, aside from his clash with my mother, that I knew Father Heffernan to back down.
For all his worldly wisdom, he had an innocence to him in certain ways. He once admonished a group of us: "Why aren't you in the church? It's the most beautful church in Ireland. Right here on your doorstep. How on earth can you pass it be without going in?"
The most beautiful church in Ireland.
The party line requires me to say that all churches are limitlessly beautiful because the Creator of the Universe is present in them.
But Newbridge College church was and is a barn.
For a start Father Hefferenan and other high ups in the Dominican Order had become convinced that one of their members, a Father Henry Flanagan (known to generations of schoolboys as Coot) was a genius and had adorned the place inside and out, with Coot's truly awful sculptures.
There was a life size madonna and child with the madonna as a hard faced Newbridge woman with her hair in a bun and Jesus as a ten year old kid with a page boy haircut looking like the most unpopular pill in 2A2 classroom. (Me.)
There were stations of the cross carved in wood in which no image could be seen as the lines and the grain of the wood made the things look like er lumps of wood.
There was a Calvary that looked inert.
There was a statue outside the church of the 17th century martyr Father Peter O'Higgins with a hangman's rope around his neck, the rope being worn askew as a tie (honest to goodness) and reminiscent of the slap dash way we boys wore our school ties.
From the point of view of the aesthetics of Newbridge College church it was all downhill from there.
I went back to that church often during my adult life and latterly was sometimes pleasantly surprised to find Father Heffernan saying mass.
He had been stationed elsewhere for decades but came back towards the end to the place of his greatest triumphs.
Both Father Heffernan and I had aged considerably. I did not doubt that each of us had retained a certain characterful individuality. We might never see eye to eye about Coot's oeuvres but with the passing of the years we apparently now agreed on at least one matter of aesthetics. When revised changes to the English language form of the mass were introduced compulsorily across the planet earth, both Father Heffernan and I judiciously ignored the ones we didn't like.
For instance we both insisted on retaining the declamatory "Lord of Power and Might," instead of the bland newly reinstituted "Lord of hosts."
Now a few months after his death, I went back to the church today and sat in the heart of it while afternoon sun spilled through the hideous stained glass windows. You can't go wrong with stained glass, I thought ruefully, but the Dominicans had found a way, featuring downbeat scenes from the apolocalypse, ruined cities and the like, and a rather unappealing (to me) representation of the Lord being adored by the angels of heaven, looking like he's being attacked by giant bees.
But this afternoon in the sun splashed stillness it all looked strangely perfect. I could appreciate it was no ordinary church. The sun's rays filling up the vault even brought Coot's usually unseeable palpably inert Stations Of The Cross carvings into relief so that you could make out the figures and savour the poetry in them. The tough Newbridge Madonna had softened and looked like quite a nice girl. The martyr Father Peter O'Higgins had straightened his tie. Jesus as a page boy looked a bit less of a pill. The crucified on Calvary was almost showing some emotion.
"I don't believe it," I exclaimed aloud and with some merriment. "Nana was right. It actually is a beautiful church."
