Accony School

The Prendergasts

In Accony today (2009) there stands one original house that has housed its occupants from the first generation, Dick Prendergast and Bridget Lyons (circa 1800), to the last occupant Richie Tommy Lannon Prendergast (died 1993) with hardly a change to its original structure except the addition of a slated backroom built in the 1920s for the ‘Yanks’. That thatched cottage, now in ruins, is over 200 years old and has seen four generations of priests born there in an unbroken sequence from uncle to nephew from the first Fr. Richard to his nephew Fr. Richard and the first Fr. James down to his nephew, the last Fr. James, a brother of Richie Tommy Lannon Prendergast and my mother Daisy Gibbons. It is certain that all but the first generation were pupils in Accony National School since its official opening c. 1847.

On the Ordnance Survey map of 1835 there is a small building visible which may well have been a hedge school as there is anecdotal evidence that there were hedge masters in the Louisburgh area at that time. That house has also seen two of its daughters get married and give two sons each to the priesthood, Fr. Tom Scott and Fr. Joe Scott, and Fr. John Sweeney and Fr. Jim Sweeney. Their mothers were pupils in Accony NS. A grandson of Mrs. Scott, another Accony priest, Fr. Redmond Lyons died only this past April (R.I.P.) in his 89^th year    ...

       ...   So there is the story of one house in cold stark facts – the bare facts of those who were born there and those who went to school from there, of those who married locally and whose children went to school in Accony, of those who died there, of those who left to get married and those who came in to marry there, of those who emigrated never to return and of those who returned to spend their final days there. It is just a fleeting account of names and events, a simple description of the passing generations. It tells nothing of the sorrows, the joys, the happiness and particularly the pride in the priesthood that each family must have felt from generation to generation and the sacrifices made to educate their children, an education started on their own doorstep.

Article by John Gibbons. Photographs courtesy of Deirdre Prendergast.