Nun shortage forces school to close
A drop in the number of nuns entering the Benedictine Order has forced the prestigious Kylemore Abbey School in Connemara, Co Galway to shut its doors.
After operating for 84 years as a boarding school, Mother Abbess Magdalena FitzGibbon OSB said the decline in vocations to the order had necessitated the closure of the secondary school.
“In common with other orders, many of our sisters have reached retirement age and with no new entrants, we no longer have the personnel necessary for the management and trusteeship of the school. We very much regret having to make this decision but having looked at the options, we are left with no alternative,” she said.
In a letter to parents, staff, the Department of Education and Science and local primary schools, Mother FitzGibbon said it was with great sadness that the trustees decided to close the school in August 2010.
The Benedictine community at the Abbey has now fallen to around 14 nuns.
After the Benedictine nuns took possession of Kylemore Castle in November 1920, they opened the Abbey as a girls secondary school two years later.
There are 137 students enrolled in Kylemore, 49 boarding students of which 34 come from outside Ireland.
The school was opened to day students from the surrounding area since 1928. Around 36 people are employed in the school. Twenty-three are teaching staff but only one is a member of the Benedictine community.
In her letter, the Abbess said: “We are anxious that the period between now and the closure should be ordered and well managed and should include a celebration of the history and significance of the school.”
The Abbey has been placed on the tourist map over the past decade after a visitor centre was developed to welcome visitors to the garden and Gothic Church in 1993.
The Benedictine Order has placed a high priority on maintaining the Abbey, and a major restoration of the Victorian walled garden was completed in the late 1990s.
