Words by Karen O’Leary.

Last week, a review of the new production of The History Boys stirred up some memories of my own school days. Susannah Clapp, theatre critic for the Observer, found the set design to be ‘puzzling’, and could only describe the classroom as ‘what looks like a static caravan’. This telling comment caught on quickly, illustrating the divide in education a little too well. Some people’s schools have prefabs, and others don’t even know what prefabs are.

Looking at Grace Smart’s set, I was reminded of my old primary school. A former convent, Fatima was set across a pair of disjointed buildings on the edge of a busy road. The only one that still resembled a convent – lurching Gothic arches, faces carved into stone columns – was a third, disused middle building that divided the school into clear halves. The other buildings were dreary in a much more boring way, with a set of prefabs out the back.

Those prefabs housed the smallest of us for the first two years of our education. They were temporary – only there to manage capacity before the ‘New School’ would be built. The prefabs didn’t bother me. They were small, but so was I. Years later, my mum told me that they bothered her. At one point construction had begun – sadly, not for the elusive ‘New School’ - on the slope behind the portacabins. She was so worried by the sight of an excavator perched on the hillside, and our classrooms sitting in its path, that she briefly withdrew me from school.

By first year, I graduated to the main buildings. These weren’t much better – or safer. The school was falling apart. One weekend, a large part of the gutter fell from the PE hall into the playground below. The fact that this didn’t occur on a school day inevitably earned it the newspaper headline ‘Miracle of Fatima’.

I was more concerned with the fact that running wasn’t allowed in the playground. In actuality, this was permitted; the unspoken agreement was just to not pass the observing teacher at full-speed. We were also told not to lean against the windows in case the glass broke. We probably still did this too, looking out at the oversized shopping mall that was being built across the road, and that’s still only half-finished today. Once - on the last day of school, no less - we all had to evacuate because of a suspected gas leak on the mall’s building site. This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to us, a minor threat that instantly cemented itself into primary school lore. Those poor girls who started their summer holidays early came back to find they had sorely missed out.

Fatima wasn’t a bad school. It had a good reputation, a waiting list. They were always petitioning the government for new premises, but with no funding available, had to come up with creative solutions in the meantime. Some classes briefly moved to a parish hall up the road, and, apparently, there was a proposal to relocate the entire school into a disused factory on the outskirts of town. In desperation, they even bussed some of us down to Dail Eireann to protest, placards and samba drums in tow. I can’t remember if this made the Six One news or not, but we did get a new school eventually. Though, by that time I had already left.