After Ruairi Quinn amalgamated the Teacher Training Colleges into a few different universities, most of them kept their “characteristic spirit” (generally a Catholic one) so Mary Immaculate remains Catholic despite being part of UL.

However, there was one complication. The Church of Ireland college and St. Pat’s were to be merged into DCU (which is a secular university.) Common sense would suggest that this would have been a good time to scrap religious teacher training.

And in this episode, I’m going to talk about this and what the consequences were for not doing so and why we have an utterly confusing Teacher Training College system in Ireland that is both controlled and not controlled by religious organisations at the same time.