'Class of 89' celebrates

The Cross & Passion Class of 1989 recently marked their 20th year since graduation with a reunion event in Kilashee House Hotel.

The event was hatched by class members Val McDonnell and Katherine Hyland, and they soon had the help of former classmates Dolores O'Brien, Audrey Owens, Honor Lundon, and Yvonne Goulding, using the 21st century methods of email and texting to get in touch with everybody.

It wasn't going to be possible to get everybody to the reunion, as the class is scattered all over the world, including America and Australia. For those who did make make it, the days and hours before were a bit nerve-wracking.

"The prospect of meeting people you haven't seen for 20 years is a pretty daunting one," Dolores O'Brien wrote in the Christmas issue of 'The Bridge', Kilcullen's community magazine. "Would there be judgements? Would all the rivalries and remembered teenage angst be washed away with 20 years of what life had sent our way?"

On the night, though, it was 'instantaneous reconnections'. "There was immediate warmth and delight at seeing 'the girls'," Dolores reported. "Amid the hugs and the 'my Gods' and 'you haven't changed a bit' there was genuine warmth."

Among those who made it were Mary Masterson, Lavinia Maloney, Jackie Keenan, Grainne O'Toole, Colette Coleman, Anna Coonan, Patricia Evans, Judy Anderson, Louise McHugh, Linda Meade, Melanie O'Halloran, Niamh Hayden (who travelled from Brussels) and Suzanne Nolan (who made the much more arduous journey from Ballinsaloe).

Though they were now a varied bunch of adult women, for one night they were all once again 6A, 6R and 6M Class of '89 from Cross & Passion College.

A Gender Footnote: Some might notice that this story is only about women? Well, that's because CPC had only become co-educational three years before and this was among the last of the all-female classes to graduate. The College was established in 1878.