Mungret College

Mungret College was a Jesuit apostolic school and a lay secondary school near Limerick, Ireland. Located on the western outskirts of the modern-day suburban town of Raheen, it was operational from 1882 until 1974 when it closed as a school for the last time. The college produced over 1000 priests in that period. It had previously been an agricultural college and a Limerick diocesan seminary until 1888.

The secondary school was relatively small, with around 225 boarders and 25 day boarders. Mungret was one of a number of Jesuit schools founded in Ireland.

In 1858 the Commissioners of Education had opened an agricultural college near the village of Mungret, from which Mungret College takes its name. This was largely due to the influence of Lord Monteagle of Brandon, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer in the British Government and a good Irish landlord. It was built to accommodate seventy to eighty students but never had more than fourteen students and at times as few as four. In 1877 it was decided to close the college.

It was rented by the Bishop of Limerick for his seminarians for the scholastic year of 1880-1881 and was then vacated.

In 1850 a young priest of the Diocese of Dromore was received into the order of the Society of Jesus; his name was Fr. William Ronan. In 1872 he was appointed rector of the Sacred Heart Church and Crescent College, Limerick, a position he was to occupy for the next ten years. There he thought about the possibility of setting up a college to provide for unfulfilled vocations in Ireland.

He discovered that a fellow Jesuit in France, in 1865, had started a scheme for the endowment of special colleges in France and Belgium, called apostolic schools, which were supported by benefactors and by the parents of students. He travelled to the Continent to visit these colleges and to seek out an experienced man to take charge of a similar college in Limerick. While staying in a Jesuit house in France, he met Fr Jean Baptiste René, a jesuit priest and member of the community, an English speaker and to the great delight of Fr. Ronan, a former head of the apostolic school at Poitiers. He was also willing to come to Ireland if his Provincial would sanction his departure.

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