Ernest and Dev

This is the key Ernest Bateman photograph. Eamon DeValera came to open the parish school – around 1955 – and the picture includes Archbishop George Otto Simms, Archbishop of Dublin

The parish website today at http://www.booterstown.dublin.anglican.org/index.php/the-booterstown-complex/takes some pride in the event.

The building was superseded in the mid-1950s by the present structure. Surely this must qualify for that much abused word “delightful” in its sturdy simplicity and harmony with the adjoining Church of St. Philip and St. James. Officially opened by Eamon de Valera, a man who spent so much of his long life in Booterstown, one of the treasured parochial photographs shows this normally stern-faced man enjoying, with Archbishop Simms and the then Rector, Canon Bateman, what we Irish call a “real good laugh”.