by Sr. Sheila Devane, MMM                    Ireland                               26.09.2026

School has now started in Ireland after the long summer holidays for the children in the primary schools all over the country.  The traffic is heavy again with families and buses ferrying the children whose school bags are bigger, brighter, and heavier than ever!  After Mass one day last week the priest came down the aisle and greeted us all; he stopped at a family of young children to enquire if they had got their school bags ready; the two older boys were about to reply when a tiny girl from the next seat rushed forward to say she too had a school bag and was starting school!  I remembered.  I was once that very small girl.  Let me tell you the story.

When I was three years old my twin sister and brother were born. We were living in a small town in the west of Ireland where everyone knew everyone and where the custom of visiting families with newborn babies was common, indeed it was expected. So, we had a lot of visitors saying immediately on arrival: … “We have come to see the twins.”  Short visits became longer and there were oohs and aahs as they believed the baby girl was really the boy and the boy with his head full of curls must be the little girl!  My father was the social welfare officer in the county, so he was a well-known figure though not a native of the area. Uptown one day he met Sr. Christina, a Sister of Mercy, and one greatly loved by the people.  She stopped to enquire about my mother, called May, and her infant twins to which Dad replied immediately: “Well, they seem to be doing very well but our great wee 3-year-old, who was so self-contained up to now, has suddenly alarmed us: she stands at the top of the stairs and screams her head off when visitors arrive. At first, she only did this when they left but now, she is rushing upstairs to roar on their arrival.  Poor May is at her wits end. ”

Sr. Christina didn’t seem in the least surprised and offered an immediate solution: “Maurice, we will bring Sheila into the junior infants’ class on Monday, just get her a small schoolbag and write her full name and date of birth on a piece of paper inside and we will give her a very low desk, a few crayons and a couple of pages from a jotter to keep her busy.”

When my older sister was getting her schoolbag out and ready for school, I was thrilled to see a bag being sown for me. Mammy was an excellent seamstress and had to quickly turn a small decorative cloth bag of her own into my school bag by adding two little straps and removing a few coloured buttons. I had a schoolbag; I was going to school.

Off I headed with daddy and my older sister, bag on back and skipping with joy on leaving the house and going to school. Sr. Christina was there at the gate, and she even showed me where to hang my coat on my own special hook beside my sister’s coat. I was then escorted into the most junior class with about ten other children all on their first day at school. I was at least one, if not two, years younger than my new companions.

Nowadays we have child psychologists, family therapists, and special support staff to help parents cope with their young children’s temper tantrums and sibling rivalry. Long ago, back in the 1940s, we were so blessed to have kind people like Sr. Christina & her Sisters of Mercy with life experience, a practical solution, and the freedom to offer the positive help that was most needed – even though the schoolbag was very small, and the 3-year-old schoolgirl herself pretty tiny too!