From Confession Boxes to Confession Pages

Upon receiving the news that I had been accepted into Maynooth University, my father began telling people I was “studying to be a priest”. 

The grounding of the joke lay, of course, in the historical background of the university: it was established in 1795 as a centre of theological education and training for the priesthood. In 1850 it expanded to hold a greater capacity. At one point, St Patrick’s seminary in Maynooth was the largest of its kind in the world. 

A small number of non-seminary students were admitted from 1966 onwards, but the clerical majority persisted. This largely continued until 1997, when the college split into the independent National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Saint Patrick’s Pontifical University. This split remains in place to this day. 

All of this is to say, my father’s generation of the 1960s and ‘70s held a different view of Maynooth University to many in the modern day. To them, Maynooth was a place of bowed heads in prayer, white robes, and towering church spirals; ‘priest college’. Far removed from Brady’s Wednesdays or raunchy SHAG Week activities, a strict regiment included early-morning prayers and daily mass services. The trainees of their day were funnelled into careers as parish priests or stern schoolteachers, rather than the wide range of careers Maynooth graduates pursue today.

So, what has changed? What has, aside from my being born female, transformed the concept of “studying to be a priest” in Maynooth from a home truth into a quick quip? 

Much of this can be put down to a general, nationwide shift in religious practises. Although the establishment of National University of Ireland, Maynooth (now Maynooth University) was enacted by the Universities Act of that same year, it occurred alongside a growing discontent with the Catholic Church in the late 1990s, leading into the early 2000s.  

Scandals involving priests rocked the country, from revelations of affairs and secret pregnancies to the far darker exposure of child sexual abuse and the hidden mechanisms that worked to hide it. The public grew disillusioned with an institution which had dictated societal norms for so long. According to Faith Survey, between 1972 and 2011, weekly church attendance by Irish Catholics fell from 91% to 30%.  

By and large, the youth of Ireland are no longer choosing religious life. Instead, they are coming to Maynooth in larger numbers than ever before, a record 17,000 students across all levels registered for the 2025/26 academic year. The university’s Strategic Plan for 2023-2028 reflects an intention to continue this trajectory, highlighting a desire for “significant and sustainable growth in international and postgraduate taught students… with moderate growth in domestic undergraduate numbers”. 

Despite this, the number of seminarians studying in St. Patrick’s Pontifical University Maynooth has dropped significantly. Though no statistics are publicly available for the 2025/26 academic year, the St Patrick’s Pontifical University website reported twenty-one new seminarians in the previous year.  

This piece does not aim to erase these students, nor am I ignoring the fact that, had I been born male, I could have become one of them. One can indeed head to Maynooth for “priest college" if they so wish. The towering steeples of South Campus are still an iconic symbol used by the university in promotional material, after all. Nor does St. Patrick’s College work to discourage students from studying there; quite the opposite. Theology students each year make use of pre-reserved accommodation in Maynooth’s Village block. 

Nonetheless, Maynooth University clearly does not hold the clerical reputation nor population of my father’s generation. Much of this is a result of the general trend of modern Ireland, an ever-growing and diversifying country. Alongside multiple Catholic Faith-based societies, the Islamic society is one of MU’s most active. Societies such as Afrosoc, the Filipino Society, and the newly established Arab Society provide a communal space for just some of Maynooth’s many students of colour. Pride Society celebrates the richness of sexuality and gender identity, in a country where homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1993.

So what, then, is the foundation of Maynooth’s student culture? Who are Maynooth students? 

If you base your perceptions on recent viral TikTok videos (which speak for themselves,), the campus appears to be a place of relative debauchery. Similar assumptions could be drawn if one reads the many slides of the popular @maynoothconfessionz Instagram page. One comment reads,  “Maynooth is the STD capital of Ireland.”  Another claims, “Only in Maynooth will you find a pure balance of both incels and freaks.” Not quite a flattering depiction.  

However, it would be far from journalistic integrity to earnestly source anonymous social media comments or confessions. Similar claims can be found on the confession pages of UCD, UL or Trinity College. Arguably, they say less about Maynooth’s student body or campus culture and more about a tendency among Irish youth to disparage the places to which they belong.

I write this piece in the midst of February’s SHAG week, a week dedicated to sexual health and consent. My friends are discussing whether to attend “Sex Toy Bingo”, the Students’ Union are running an “Intersectional Shag Stall”; an unimaginable concept, surely, to the pious seminarians who lived and studied here just some decades ago. Maynooth’s student life no longer reflects the strict Catholic faith that once dominated, but a lively and diverse student population.

Maynooth students are of all backgrounds, faiths, creeds, and cultures. While one can pin this down to the general trend of Irish politics and society, our university’s clerical past arguably sets us apart as a starker example of societal evolution, a microcosm of generational change. The humour of my father’s joke now lies in the absurdity of the image of a conservative “priest college” in our modern nation. If it gets a laugh, it’s only because it belongs to a very different Ireland, and an entirely different Maynooth.