5 December 2025

Setting up Saint Mary’s School for the Deaf, Cabra 

In the archives, we have copies of two letters, translated from French, that speak about setting up a school for the ‘deaf and dumb’ and are written by a ‘Reverend Mr Furon’, very probably to Father Thomas McNamara CM. Father Furon mentions a superioress of a community agreeing to help to set up a school in Ireland for children with hearing impairments. Two members of a religious community are to be sent from Ireland to France to be trained in Le Bon Saveur School for six months before returning to Ireland. These Irish Sisters must have been Dominican Sisters who would then bring back newly acquired knowledge of how to care for deaf children.

Father Furon appears to have been a priest of the Diocese of Bayeux, and chaplain to the community of Sisters of Bon Saveur in Caen, where there was a school for deaf children. It is documented that Father McNamara CM himself visited that school in Caen in advance of his helping the Dominican Sisters to set up their own school in Cabra in 1846. He became a co-founder of Saint Mary’s school for the Deaf in Cabra in that year. Father McNamara was to become Provincial of the Irish Province much later in 1864, the second Vincentian to hold that position in Ireland, succeeding Father Philip Dowley CM.