Christian and De La Salle brothers did their best for pupils of all classes

I REFER to Gregóir de Buitléir’s letter (‘A Mon boy rallies to defence of Christian Brothers’, May 14) in response to Matt Cooper’s column (May 9) about the brothers at the ‘North Mon’ in Cork.

I went to a De La Salle brothers’ secondary school in a working class area of Dublin in the early 1960s. The parents of the pupils were a mixture of middle class, working class and the unemployed. This was before the era of free education, so you had to pay a fee of about £7 a term or £21 a year — not huge even then.

I heard on the grapevine that some boys were excused payment of fees because their parents could not afford it. However, I never heard their names since that information was taboo.