End of an era: ‘devastation’ as West Mayo National School closes after 177 years
It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The 'one-teacher school' label was hard to shake and overshadowed everything else good that went on in the classroom.
There are other factors that fed into it but the result is the same: Drummin NS has shut its doors after 177 educating the children of Drummin and the surrounding areas.
‘Devastating’ was the common response among the more than thirty people who gathered at the national school last Wednesday to mark its closure.
With three of the six pupils moving to secondary school next September, the school’s remaining population of three students meant that it was no longer viable to continue.
Drummin had been a one-teacher school for a number of years before Katie McGarrigle took over as principal, and she believes that status made closure feel like a foregone conclusion to many outsiders.
“That label of a one-teacher school is a hard one to get away from,” she said. “It's very difficult — when people see it becoming one teacher, they think it's only a matter of time before it closes.”
But she said visitors to the school were often surprised by what they found.
“People don't often understand what goes on within the four walls of the school. When people come in and visit, they're usually blown away by the students here.”
The core issue, McGarrigle explained, was a shortage of enrolments at the junior end of the school. “We needed kids down low in the lower end of the school — preferably a good few junior infants and senior infants to come in together. Possibly five or six,” she said. “We were quite top-heavy here — third class up to sixth — and that gap that existed lower down, that's where we'd need to have filled.”
Location compounded the problem. Several families who showed interest from Westport and Castlebar were ultimately put off by the distance once they saw it for themselves.
“One mother was crying because she said it had her heart set on this school, but it would have been 45 minutes out and back twice a day,” McGarrigle recalled. “It just wasn't going to happen.”
The school had also explored setting up a playschool feeder in the area, but was told it was unlikely to be sustainable given a nearby playschool already serving the area.
Former student at the school, Brian Gibbons, is clear where the blame lies: “If the people in the catchment area had used the school, it wouldn’t be closing down.
“The community do not realise what they are losing. It hasn’t been properly supported.
“We have a good service here, a good school, in the centre of our parish and it’s not properly supported by the local community. There is no point in saying anything else, you have to call a spade a spade.”
His youngest son was one of the three students graduating on Wednesday and he notes that this facility won’t be here for future generations and people will have to go elsewhere for an education .
“It’s a sad day. The service is here and it’s not being utilised.”
For principal Katie McGarrigle, the closure is bittersweet. “It's a hard pill to swallow, I suppose,” she said. “But I think we're trying to focus on the positive and what we have achieved since I've been here, and from teachers here before, and past principals.”
She acknowledged the sadness felt across the area, but said her focus now is on the children still in her care.
“People can say it's a sad day for Drummin, and it's a sad day for the community, and yes, it is, and I agree with them," she said. “But I think for the boys that are here at the moment, I'm trying my very best just to make it as positive as possible, and to celebrate them, not the fact that the school is closed.”
McGarrigle said the intimacy of teaching in such a small school had given her an experience she'll never forget: “I spend more time with these boys than I do my own kids, so I knew them inside out. I knew how they learned, I knew what helped them, I knew what their interests were, and that's what makes learning very easy.”
Former principal Tereasa McGuire, who led the school for many years, remembered a freer, more nurturing style of education.
“We were people-centred long before Carl Rogers was talking about people-centred,” she said, referencing the influential psychologist. “We had a lovely school community , and very supportive parents ... if the day was going good, we'd have a long break.”
She reflected on what really stays with children from their school years.
“You don't remember the day you learned to divide or multiply — you remember the day somebody said you were brilliant.”
McGuire connected the school's closure to a broader erosion of rural community life.
“The post office went while I was still here. Now the school will be gone, and the church is hanging on by the skin of its teeth,” she said. “We're going to have to review what community is ... it doesn't come naturally, particularly post-Covid, because people have lost communication skills.”
She recalled the school once being praised by a member of the British royal family: “I remember at one stage the Princess Royal said she wished her own children could have gone to a school like that.”
Numbers had been falling for years, McGuire said. “There were 28 [pupils], and then it started to go down — when I left, there were eight.”
She pointed to changing family sizes and lifestyles, including households with one car and two working parents, as factors beyond anyone's control.
“People made choices based on their life circumstances, and we can't fault that — but it is sad. Once a place closes, that's it.”
Stephen King, a past pupil who still passes the school building every day, said simply: “It's a sad day for the parish to see the school closing down.”
Martin Hopkins, who left Drummin NS in 2010, remembered school tours fondly, including a trip to London with the school's principal and the local priest. “We had great opportunities,” he said. “We've been talking about all our ambitions for the future, and writing about them, and we just got a great opportunity to pursue our dreams — that was started off from here.”
Jim McHugh, who became principal of Drummin in 1959 — his first teaching job after training college, at a time when newly qualified teachers could take charge of a two-teacher school — recalled around 50 pupils attending in those early years.
McHugh said the closure reflects a pattern playing out nationwide. “It's a shame to think that a fine school like this is closing down, and it's happening all over the country, really,” he said. He noted irony in current government efforts to ease rural housing, suggesting it might come too late for schools like Drummin. “If you live in an area like this, it's just such a pity. I know when they close schools, they'll probably offer a bus service to some neighbouring schools.”
The O’Malley family live right across the road from the school and would have sent their daughters there but for the school closing.
No country for small schools
Drummin's closure is part of a broader pattern of rural school closures in County Mayo and across Ireland . Two primary schools have closed in County Mayo since 2020, including SN Naomh Seosamh in Achill, which shut in September 2022. Nationally, 30 primary schools closed or are due to close between 2020 and 2026. Mayo currently has two single-teacher schools remaining, out of nine nationwide.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education and Youth said the decision to close a school rests with its patron or trustees, who may submit closure proposals for departmental consideration. Any such proposal “involves extensive consultation at local level and must be well planned and managed in a manner that accommodates the interests of students, parents, teachers and local communities,” the spokesperson said.
Patrons are also asked to weigh up the impact on staffing, equipment and school records, the Department said, while the future use of a closed school building is a matter for its property owners. The Department added that it must also assess how a closure might affect “the viability of other schools in the area and any future implications for school place availability.”
With closure confirmed late in the school year, McGarrigle said much of the summer will now be spent winding the school down — moving furniture and resources to other schools in the area. Her biggest fear is for the building itself.
“Because you become so attached to a place ... my biggest worry would be that the school is left and that it's left to kind of deteriorate,” she said, noting decisions on the building's future rest with the patron or the Department of Education, not the school itself. Affected staff will be redeployed elsewhere.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme