Take up any Christian Brothers’ school yearbook from the decades after Independence and you can almost touch the sense of triumph, the naked delight that Our Boys are taking over the state that Our Boys had made for them. The CBS Synge Street yearbook for 1946−7, for instance, opens with a message from an old boy, now a TD and lord mayor of Dublin, praising the ‘good Brothers who taught me to love God, His Holy Mother and Ireland’.
