Patrick Rogers was an Irish Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Down and Connor, an ecclesiastical historian, author and educationalist. He spent much of his professional life as Principal of St. Joseph's College of Education, a male only teacher training college in Belfast which merged in 1985 to become St. Mary's University College, Belfast.
Rogers was born in Rawalpindi, India and educated at St Malachy's College, studying for the priesthood in St. Patrick's College Maynooth and was ordained there in 1929. Having excelled at history he was sent for post graduate study and in 1934 his thesis was published as The Irish Volunteers and Catholic Emancipation 1778 - 1793 with an introduction by Eoin MacNeill [1]
He was appointed to the staff of St. Malachy's College in Belfast and taught history there his appointment as the first principal of St. Joseph's College of Education at Trench House in 1947. [2]
Among the students who passed through the College while Rogers was on the staff, or later still Principal were, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Seamus Mallon, Mickey Harte and the former Chief Executive of Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Brian Ferran.
A flavour of the College in the 1960s, under Rogers, was given in a Canadian account of Heaney teaching there; "it doubled as a cross between a medium secure prison and a Trappist monastery." [3] Another former student recalled him as am "austere man....with a dry sense of humour underneath his uncompromising, strict and forbidding appearance." [4]
Rogers, always a heavy smoker, died in October 1969 and was interred in Priest's Row in Milltown Cemetery.
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
Theobald Mathew was an Irish Catholic priest and teetotalist reformer, popularly known as Father Mathew. He was born at Thomastown, near Golden, County Tipperary, on 10 October 1790, to James Mathew and his wife Anne, daughter of George Whyte, of Cappaghwhyte. Of the family of the Earls Landaff, he was a kinsman of the clergyman Arnold Mathew.
Theobald Wolfe Tone, posthumously known as Wolfe Tone, was a revolutionary exponent of Irish independence and is an iconic figure in Irish republicanism. Convinced that so long as his fellow Protestants feared to make common cause with the Catholic majority, the British Crown would continue to govern Ireland in the interest of England and of its client aristocracy, in 1791 Tone helped form the Society of United Irishmen. Although received in the company of a Catholic delegation by the King and his ministers in London, Tone, with other United Irish leaders, despaired of constitutional reform. Fuelled by the popular grievances of rents, tithes and taxes, and driven by martial-law repression, the society developed as an insurrectionary movement. When, in the early summer of 1798, it broke into open rebellion, Tone was in exile soliciting assistance from the French Republic. In October 1798, on his second attempt to land in Ireland with French troops and supplies, he was taken prisoner. Sentenced to be hanged, he died from a reportedly self-inflicted wound.
Earl Landaff, of Thomastown in the County of Tipperary, was a title in the Peerage of Ireland. It was created in 1797 for Francis Mathew, 1st Viscount Landaff, who had previously represented County Tipperary in the Irish House of Commons. He had already been created Baron Landaff, of Thomastown in the County of Tipperary, in 1783, and Viscount Landaff, of Thomastown in the County of Tipperary, in 1793, also in the Peerage of Ireland. In 1800 he was elected as one of the 28 original Irish representative peer. He was succeeded by his son, the second Earl. The titles became extinct on his death in 1833. Thomastown Castle was the childhood home of Father Theobald Mathew, "The Apostle of Temperance".
St Mary's University College is a university college in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
St Malachy's College, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is the oldest Catholic diocesan college in Ulster. The college's alumni and students are known as Malachians.
St Columb's College is a Roman Catholic boys' grammar school in Derry, Northern Ireland. Since 2008, it has been a specialist school in mathematics. It is named after Saint Columba, the missionary monk from County Donegal who founded a monastery in the area. The college was originally built to educate young men into the priesthood, but now educates boys in a variety of disciplines.
Milltown Cemetery is a large cemetery in west Belfast, Northern Ireland. It lies within the townland of Ballymurphy, between Falls Road and the M1 motorway.
The Volunteers were local militias raised by local initiative in Ireland in 1778. Their original purpose was to guard against invasion and to preserve law and order at a time when British soldiers were withdrawn from Ireland to fight abroad during the American Revolutionary War and the government failed to organise its own militia. Taking advantage of Britain's preoccupation with its rebelling American colonies, the Volunteers were able to pressure Westminster into conceding legislative independence to the Dublin parliament. Members of the Belfast 1st Volunteer Company laid the foundations for the establishment of the United Irishmen organisation. The majority of Volunteer members however were inclined towards the yeomanry, which fought and helped defeat the United Irishmen in the Irish rebellion of 1798.
The Diocese of Down and Connor, is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or diocese of the Catholic Church in Northern Ireland. It is one of eight suffragan dioceses in the ecclesiastical province of the metropolitan Archdiocese of Armagh. Bishop Alan McGuckian is Bishop.
Patrick Joseph Walsh was an Irish prelate of the Roman Catholic Church from Cobh, County Cork. From 1991 until 2008 he was the 31st Bishop of Down and Connor.
Dónal McKeown is a Roman Catholic prelate from Northern Ireland who has served as Bishop of Derry since 2014.
Michael McLaverty was an Irish writer of novels and short stories.
Saint Malachy's Church is a Catholic church in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is located in Alfred Street, a short distance from Belfast City Hall, although it precedes that building by over 60 years. The church is the focal point of the local parish community, also Saint Malachy's, one of the 88 parishes in the Diocese of Down and Connor. It is oldest Catholic church in the city of Belfast continiously in use: both St Mary's Church, Belfast and St Patrick's Church, Belfast having been substantially or totally rebuilt.
St Peter's College, Wexford is an Irish secondary school and former seminary located in Summerhill, overlooking Wexford town. It is a single-sex school for male pupils. Currently, the school has 785 students enrolled.
Our Lady and St Patrick's College, Knock, known locally as Knock or OLSPCK, is a Catholic diocesan grammar school in Knock in the east of Belfast in Northern Ireland. The school, with an expanding enrolment, announced in late 2019 it anticipated future enrolment of 1,330.
Patrick McAlister (1826–1895) was an Irish Roman Catholic Prelate and 24th Lord Bishop of Down and Connor.
Lieutenant General Montague James Mathew was an Anglo-Irish soldier and politician, a member of the Irish House of Commons for Ballynakill until 1800 and of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom for County Tipperary from 1806 until his death in 1819.
William Steel Dickson (1744–1824) was an Irish Presbyterian minister and member of the Society of the United Irishmen, committed to the cause of Catholic Emancipation, democratic reform, and national independence. He was arrested on the eve of the United Irish rising in his native County Down in June 1798, and not released until January 1802.
Rt. Rev. Mgr. Canon James P. Clenaghan, P.P., V.G., St Malachy's Church, Belfast was a distinguished senior Irish churchman and educationalist whose entire ministry was in the Diocese of Down and Connor where he rose to become Vicar General.