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| Image courtesy Google Maps. |
I've always been fascinated by infrastructure and utilities such as electrical and plumbing systems. When we were in senior infants, I remember Richard Brophy, a classmate, and I lifting manhole covers in the yard of the old girls' school, which is now the parish centre. Maybe this was one of our chores to make sure the drains weren't blocked or else we were just curious. In any case, the nuns would have been hidden away in their "hut" at lunch time, unaware of what we were up to. Hosing out the toilet block in the old boys' school, which wasn't much cleaner than a cow shed, would be a weekly chore in years to come. A more pleasant job in 6th class was being sent around all the classrooms to collect the contents of the waste paper baskets and then lighting a huge bonfire against the wall of the briquette shed— all unsupervised, but great fun. I wondered as a child about the object shown in the photos above. In the early 70s, it was a green, cast-iron pipe, sticking out of the ground, possibly with a certain amount of decorative detail. In modern times, infrastructural components such as lamp posts tend to be purely functional, but in the past, they were often ornately designed — for example some of the poles that once carried Dublin's overhead tram wires have now been repurposed as lamp posts. The pipe in the photos was still extant in 2009 and covered in ivy, but disappeared when the boundary wall of CPC was rebuilt. It was presumably a sewage vent, which became unnecessary for a reason I'm unsure of. Vents like this are used in domestic plumbing systems to allow air into sewerage systems to prevent water from being siphoned out of S and P-traps and to allow wastewater to flow freely.