St Malachy’s College

OK, let’s get this out of the way first. I am a lady. With ladybits. St Malachy’s is a boys’ college. For boys. But I’m going to review it anyway.
There are two reasons for this. One is that no-​one can live in Belfast for any amount of time and not be aware of St Malachy’s. The amount of young gentlemen I have met during the course of my, em, career who are past pupils of the place has been considerable, and they have all had nothing but good things to say about it.
The second reason is that back in my North Belfast News days, I interviewed the headmaster as part of a feature on the school. How pleased I was to go up that drive and into the hallowed halls of the school for a nosy. Yes, really. I’m a geek.
Dr Morrin took over an hour out of his very busy day to go through the history and ethos of the college with me, and it was one of my more memorable and enjoyable interviews. I was in St Malachy’s, for freak’s sake! As a ladyperson!
I mentioned that I had two ex boyfriends who were past pupils, and he remembered them both. Even better, although he was the soul of discretion, he clearly liked the good one and had dubious memories of the bad one. Ha.
An outstanding school and a Belfast institution. I still smile going past it on the bus up the Antrim Road. Oh, and their website is pretty good too.

St Malachy’s College was my secondary school, and I have some great memories from it. The school has a long and illustrious history and it felt great to be part of it. The name of the college has also held me in good stead since I have left, as it such a well known school within the city.
It has a brilliant music college and is also really into sport. Most of the team sports you could think of are played at the school to quite a high level.
What I really enjoyed most about the school was the tradition that the school managed to maintain, while still moving with the times. The traditional old blocks of the school arestill used, and sometimes if you were lucky you got to go on a tour of some of the closed off areas, you can see the old dorm rooms and other areas no longer used.
I must say that through hearing peoples experiences from other secondary schools, I have found that St Malachy’s College gives the students not only the knowledge to progress through life, but a level of independence with study that was incredibly useful when moving on to 3^rd level education.

St. Malachy’s College is where I spent the last two years of my Secondary school education. I moved here from my old school because they offered the subjects I wanted to do at A Level. The style of teaching was quite different in that it was a lot more relaxed in St Malachy’s than it was in my previous school and I don’t know if that was a good thing or not. More importantly, this is where I met some the most inspiring teachers (as well as complete ejits) and made friends that I still have five years on.
The majority of the buildings are very old and have a great history behind them. A lot of these buildings were left unoccupied and we’d often have a wonder around them. These were the old dorms which now were left empty but still have quite a lot of the furniture in them, which made them quite creepy.
The Study area’s used by the 6^th year students hold a lot of good memories for me. This is where a lot of students spent their free periods just chatting or more importantly (ahem) revising. A great place that I even today still have a lot of time for.