Holy Trinity NS to hold demonstration in Westport outside site earmarked for Sacred Heart School

A Westport school which says it is fighting for its existence is to hold a demonstration outside a site where it had been pledged a brand new school building.

Holy Trinity NS are calling on the public to gather at 1.30pm on today (Friday, October 18), and march from The Octagon towards the site of the former convent on Altamount Street, where the Church of Ireland primary school had been promised a new premises at the derelict Scoil Phádraig.

Work is ongoing to turn the site into temporary accommodation for the all-girls Sacred Heart School (SHS), who intend to occupy the building from September 2025.

“We are fighting for the very existence of our school and our community,” Eoin Holmes, Chairman of the Holy Trinity NS Board of Management’s Building Committee, told The Mayo News.

“Traditionally, Westport town has been a fantastically egalitarian town with respect for each other’s traditions and the sharing and an understanding of it. Unfortunately, the Department of Education doesn’t understand that. It has forced the Sacred Heart School into a position whereby, for no good reason, they are being forced to participate in the destruction of our school.”

Holy Trinity NS are currently using a building on the Newport Road that dates back to the nineteenth century that has been deemed not-fit-for purpose.

The Department of Education cited an ‘urgent’ need for temporary accommodation when informing Holy Trinity NS of the decision to give the school to SHS.

The all-girls secondary school is currently using modular accommodation due to insufficient capacity in its existing building.

Mr Holmes has again called on the SHS board of management to refuse to occupy the school and instead use extra modular accommodation on their grounds.

^{The former Convent of Mercy in Westport, which is located beside the former Scoil Phádraig (Pic: The Mayo News)}

“We are asking for the Sacred Heart board of management and say ‘no’ to the department: ‘We don’t need to move up to Altamount Street, there are other cheaper and faster alternatives to housing the girls of Sacred Heart and we are not going to do it.’ I think that would be a very Westport thing for the school to do,” he said.

“Pitting one school tradition against another school tradition in order to facilitate some mandarin high up in the civil service who doesn’t want to admit that he or she has made a mistake, and in order to save face they are digging in their heels, and in so doing they are putting the Sacred Heart board of management in a very invidious position.

“We have been advised repeatedly, and I have personally been advised, by people for the planning and building unit in Tullamore, that if Sacred Heart refused to move to Altamount Street, the Department of Education would have no alternative than to find them alternative accommodation,” he added.

Mr Holmes said that a new school building for SHS could be ‘as many as twenty years away’ due to the complicated nature of the site, which is situated beside the all-boys Sacred Heart School.

The amalgamation of the two secondary schools - which accommodate over 1,000 students between them - is not being considered by their respective governing bodies.

Both schools have received approval for co-education, with Rice College due to admit girls from September 2025 and SHS to progress plans for co-education ‘from 2026 onwards’.

“Is the department seriously planning to build a boys co-ed school and a girls co-ed school? I don’t think so,” Mr Holmes commented.