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their children who were not cut out for academia. It was perfectly possible to take domestic science instead of maths and Latin, and feel no humiliation in doing so. ‘The view at the time was that we who took this route had a lot more fun,’ as Adrienne Lavelle, another contemporary of Maeve, recalls. ‘We used to go twice a week to the technical college in Dún Laoghaire and come back with all these food dishes. Others used to envy us for that.’
    The Society of the Holy Child was founded in 1846 by Philadelphia-born Cornelia Connelly and approved in 1887 by Pope Leo XIII. Its rules and constitutions were confirmed and ratified in 1893 and based on those of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, although it was not a Jesuit order.
    The Society had initially been turned down by the dioceses in Ireland to which they applied because there were already many religious orders running convent schools there, including the Sacred Heart, the Dominicans, the Mercy Sisters,the Presentations and the Loretos. Only when the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John McQuaid, became concerned that too many Irish girls were going to England for their education and marrying Protestants, did he invite the Society of the Holy Child to open up in his diocese.
    On 15 September 1947, a century after the founding of the Society, the school at Killiney settled into an old hotel overlooking Killiney Bay, a short walk from the railway station and close to the Archbishop’s own house.
    McQuaid already knew the Binchys, having attended Clongowes Wood in the early twentieth century alongside Michael, James, Joseph, Owen and Daniel. Maeve became a day girl at the Holy Child Killiney in 1950, travelling the few miles from Dalkey on the little train which even to this day takes the girls to and fro around the bay.
    The school was ordered along lines set out by the then headmistress , a one-off who had a huge effect on Maeve, such that she kept in touch with Mother St Dominic, as she was known, until she died in her nineties among the Holy Child community in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.
    Mother St Dominic was the hidden factor of excellence at Killiney. As soon as anyone met her they were won over, and the girls trailed after her as if she were the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Past pupils remember a very tall, bespectacled woman with a wonderful smile and great presence, a sense of proportion and above all a sense of humour. Said Susan McNally, ‘She
was
Killiney. We all loved her.’
    Instead of the Jesuit model of discipline, Mother St Dominicexercised Cornelia Connolly’s conviction that girls will never learn unless they are happy, and put the onus of discipline onto the pupils themselves. As Valerie, also a contemporary of Maeve, remembers:
    When it came to discipline the nuns tried to get us to think for ourselves. They tried to develop a sense of
self
-discipline in us and we were frequently put on our honour to act in the right way. They tried to get us to see the bigger picture of life and where our responsibilities lay. We were not compelled to do things. Discipline did not come down on us from above. It was not imposed on us, as it was in other schools. This was something new.
    In the 1950s this was indeed new. If a major infraction occurred then it would be pursued. ‘Not to steal was a huge thing at school,’ remembers Maeve’s friend Patricia Hamilton. ‘I remember once someone was discovered to have been stealing and the whole school was summoned and the nuns were there. We were kept in there for ages, and people had to go through other people’s lockers to see if they were the culprit.’
    But day to day, rather than chastisements, Mother St Dominic brought her personal charisma and – most especially – her character and sense of humour to bear. Said Susan,
    We would be in the classroom making an awful noise, and nuns always wore their rosary beads down from the waist and Mother would always come holding her beads so