Priest’s legacy proves a helping hand to teachers

Struggling teachers are being helped out with a €20,000 gift left by a late Irish-American priest whose family got the same kind of help of their later father’s union more than 80 years ago.

The legacy from Kerry-born Fr Thomas O’Connor to the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) was a repayment for the help his mother and siblings received when he was a child.

He died in 2008 after spending most of his long life in the US, but he was 11 months old when his father, also Thomas, died suddenly at Christmas 1930 in his early 30s. His mother Nora was left to care for himself and four other children aged under eight.