1976 -  2017: John Gaffaney

St Thomas’s Educational Institution retires on Friday 7 July 2017

Friday 12,30 – 3pm 30 June: Staff Room, drop and see John, all welcome.

Questions:

How do you measure service to a community? (27 years on the Board of Trustees)

How do you measure input and influence that you may have had on the young men you have taught and mentored?

More importantly who is going take over the micro-phone at the athletic and swimming sorts where that iconic laconic voice dictates the pace and mood of the day after 42 years. The job will be advertised and interviews take place. Another difficult forth coming decision.

John arrived at St Thomas’s in 1975 where the cane was in use, using white chalk and a real black, black board, a gestentinar, were the technological devices of the day. The Christian Brothers were teaching Colleagues.

A distant era, flagons, no cell phones, no email, no computers, no face book, telephone party lines and where you had to talk to people face to face, where climbing trees and riding bikes were the norm. Students wrote in Journals; multiple teachers wrote reports in their own hand writing on individual student reports. Where if you failed Scholl certificate you repeated as a second year fifth former.

Special Occasion.

Friday 12,30 – 3pm 30 June: Staff Room, drop and see John, all welcome.

A St Thomas’s man he shall remain