The Irish College at Santiago de Compostela, 1605–1769

Patricia O'Connell

The Irish College at Santiago de Compostela, 1605–1769 covers the history of this important college with its associations with the early Irish exiles who came into Galicia, the north-west Celtic regions of Spain. It follows the lives of hundreds of Irish clerical students who were forced to leave Ireland because of the Penal Laws against Catholics at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th. These seminarians were trained as priests in the six colleges set up between 1590 and 1649 – five in Spain (Salamanca, Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Madrid and Alcalá de Henares) and one in Portugal, in Lisbon.

Based on material from several archives but primarily from the Salamanca Archive manuscript source in the Russell Library, NUI, Maynooth, this unique source includes the records of many of the colleges repatriated to Ireland in the 1950s and gives a vivid portrait of life in the Compostela college where the students studied philosophy before going on to the Irish college at Salamanca to follow their course in theology and be duly ordained before travelling back to Ireland to conduct their underground ministry.

Patricia O'Connell is a former librarian of NUI, Galway and the author of The Irish College at Alcalá de Henares, 1649–1785 (1997), and The Irish College at Lisbon (FCP, 2001).