St. Colman's College

St Colman's College is a Catholic grammar school for boys in Newry, with 860 pupils and 125 places a year. Almost nobody local calls it that. The school itself says it is known throughout Ireland as Violet Hill College, after the site it moved to in 1829, and the canteen, the prospectus and the boys all use it. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

It opened in 1823 on William Street as the Dromore Diocesan Seminary, founded by Fr J.S. Keenan, and marked its bicentenary in 2023. The chapel, consecrated in 1938, holds a collection of stained glass by the Harry Clarke Studio that the school commissioned itself in the 1930s, and a two-manual Kenneth Jones pipe organ. Gaelic football is what the school is known for beyond Newry: twenty MacRory Cups and eight Hogan Cups, the first of those in 1967. There has been a school musical every second year since the first Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in 1945.

New boys are not called Year 8 here, they are J1. Their first day is an induction day of its own, with a Mass for pupils, staff and families and a barbecue afterwards in the grounds. The school opens at eight and the day starts sharply at nine, on ten periods of thirty-five to forty minutes, finishing at half three. What happens next is unusual: supervised evening study runs from twenty to four until twenty past five, in the library and the ICT rooms, and the building does not close until then. Juniors and seniors have separate entrances. There is no house system.