PRINCIPAL’S ADDRESS: Senior Prizegiving, 10 September 2026

Good evening, everyone. Bishop Michael, Chair of Governors Mrs Eileen Fearon, other members of the Board who are here tonight, Fr Séamus White, our chaplain colleagues, parents and friends of St Paul’s, and most importantly of all, our prize winners. You are all very welcome to Senior Prizegiving for the Class of 2026.

This is a September with a difference. St Paul’s opened its doors in September 1966, sixty years ago this month. It’s our Diamond Jubilee. There will be time across the year to mark that properly, and we will. Tonight I will say only this. A school does not reach sixty years on bricks and mortar. It reaches sixty years on people.

And the first name on that roll of people is Michael Warde. He came from Mayo to Bessbrook at thirty years of age to be our first Principal, and he gave this school thirty years. He believed, long before it was the fashion, that a school should take every child it is given and find the best in each of them. That belief is not a memory here. Walk our corridors any morning and you will meet it: kindness, quiet pride, and the refusal to write anybody off. Everything we honour tonight is Michael Warde’s idea, still working. In this sixtieth year, we remember him with gratitude and with love.

And because he was a Mayo man, allow me one more sentence. The last time Mayo won the All-Ireland, Michael Warde was a schoolboy in the county. Seventy-five years that wait lasted, and this July, Sam Maguire finally went home. I like to think the mighty man from Mayo had the best seat in the house.

The people this school exists for, though, are sitting in front of me now.  So let me begin where the evening belongs. To every pupil receiving a prize tonight, congratulations. You earned this. Nobody sat those examinations for you. Nobody walked into the hall on your behalf, or gave up the spring evenings, or kept going through the module that would not come right. You did that. Your results, at GCSE and at A Level, are the proof of it.

I want to be clear about what we are celebrating. It is not simply a set of grades, impressive as they are. Behind every certificate handed out tonight there is a story, and no two of those stories are the same. Some of you found this work came easily and pushed yourselves anyway, which takes its own kind of character. Some of you fought for every mark, through illness, through worry, through the ordinary storms of being sixteen or eighteen. In this school we take equal pride in the pupil who dragged a grade up through sheer stubbornness as we do in the pupil whose page filled with A stars. The certificate records the outcome. We know the cost. Both deserve the applause you will hear tonight.

Our A Level prize winners have already scattered, in the best sense. Some are beginning degrees this month, in Belfast and Dublin and further afield. Others have started Higher Level Apprenticeships, or gone straight into work, or into training for a trade. I want to say something about that, because St Paul’s has always sent its pupils down both roads, and has always been proud of both, and I would not have it any other way. The young person learning a trade is not settling for less. The undergraduate in a lecture hall is not wasting their time. They are different roads out of the same school, and we honour them equally.

But I will admit that one road is getting talked down at the minute, and I want to take that on, because you, parents, are the ones weighing it up at kitchen tables across south Armagh. You will have heard the argument. It is fashionable now. Too many young people go to university, we are told. Degrees are not worth what they were. Better to be practical.

I think that argument is wrong, and I will tell you why.

The opening up of university education over the past sixty years, almost exactly the lifetime of this school, has been one of the great engines of good in these islands. It carried the children of farmers and factory workers and dinner ladies into medicine, law, teaching, engineering, research. It changed families in a single generation. Plenty of the people now declaring that university is overrated hold degrees themselves, degrees somebody else paid for, and you may be sure their own children will be filling in university applications come what may. When you hear the argument, ask who is making it.

And where young people do struggle to find their footing after school, the honest answer is rarely that they studied the wrong things. It is that too many places have too few decent jobs to offer them. That is a failure of local economies, not of learning. You do not fix it by telling a bright eighteen-year-old from Bessbrook to lower her sights.

There is a second argument I want to put to you, and it is the one I feel most strongly about. We are living through the age of artificial intelligence. Your sons and daughters will work alongside machines that can write, summarise, calculate and imitate at a speed no human being can match. Some people conclude from this that we should train young people only in the technical and the practical, and let the machines do the thinking. I believe the opposite is true, and this summer I found myself with an unexpected ally.

In May, Pope Leo published his first encyclical. He gave it a title worth hearing in full: Magnifica humanitas. Magnificent humanity – On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. Remember why he took the name Leo. The last Leo wrote Rerum Novarum, the Church’s great defence of the dignity of working people in the first machine age. His successor looked at our age and reached for the same name. A hundred and thirty years apart, the Church saying one thing: the machine serves the person. Never the other way round. And there is a single line in that letter I would ask every family here to carry home tonight. “AI does not feel joy or pain and does not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.”

In July the conversation came to our own doorstep. Just up the road in Armagh, Archbishop Eamon Martin sat down with senior leaders of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, to discuss that encyclical. The Archbishop spoke afterwards about defending the dignity of every human person. And the head of OpenAI in Ireland said something I have not been able to put down since. Artificial intelligence, she said, should not replace human judgement about what matters.

Human judgement about what matters. Where do you think that comes from? It comes from history, which teaches us what happens when human beings get things wrong. It comes from literature, which teaches us what it is like to be somebody else. It comes from languages, from philosophy, from faith, from art. In an age when we can outsource so much of our thinking to a machine, and when none of us can be entirely sure that what we see on a screen is true, the subjects that train judgement, subjects our pupils have studied diligently in St Paul’s and will reap their rewards tonight – those subjects have rarely mattered more.

The industry says so itself, when you listen closely. This summer, the head of one of the largest technology companies on earth took a full page of the Wall Street Journal to make a promise. Personal superintelligence, he called it. Every person on the planet with a power beyond human capacity, to build, to discover, to invent. I read it carefully, twice, and plenty of it I believe. But read it as a parent and you notice something. In the whole page there is no child, no teacher, no family. He can promise your children the most powerful tool in history, and I take him at his word. What he cannot promise, what no company on earth can promise, is the person who will hold it. People are not manufactured in data centres. They are formed, slowly, in homes and parishes and schools like this one. The tool is their business. The person is ours.

I will be honest with you. I use these tools. This school uses them. They are powerful, they are useful, and they are not going away. So, I am not going to tell our young people to be afraid of them. I am going to tell them something harder, and truer. The more the machines can do, the more it matters what only you can do. So, when your child tells you they want to study history, or English, or Irish, or music, do not hear it as a risk. Hear it as an answer to the times.

And a wee word for our language learners, our modern linguists, and for our Gaeilgeoirí in particular. A machine can translate the Irish language in a second. It has never felt what it is to belong to it. A machine can hold the words; only a speaker holds what the words hold. When you speak Irish you are keeping faith with every voice that carried the language to you, and you are handing it on with your own sound in it. Níl san inneall ach macalla; is sibhse an guth. The machine is only an echo. You are the voice.

The Pope calls in that encyclical for an educational alliance, families, schools and communities together, teaching young people to use these tools without being used by them. I read that phrase twice, because I recognised it. An educational alliance is not something we need to build. It is this room. It is what you have been part of every day your child has been at St Paul’s.

Which brings me to the thanks, and they are heartfelt. Parents, nothing that was achieved this year was achieved without you. You did the lifts, the late suppers, the quiet words at the right moment, and the wise silence when a word would have been one too many. Your children’s names are on the certificates and the many awards. Your fingerprints are on them too.

To my colleagues, the teachers and support staff of St Paul’s, thank you. The results we celebrate tonight were built in classrooms, at lunchtime revision sessions, in corridor conversations, over marking done at your own kitchen tables. And to our Governors, thank you for your stewardship of this school as it enters its seventh decade.

Prize winners, one last word, and it is for you. This school asks four things of everyone who passes through it: truth, compassion, integrity and kindness. You will remember the charge we set for our senior pupils. Have integrity. Be the same person in private that you are in public. Machines can now do many things. They cannot do that. Only you can.

Our motto is In Caritate Radicati, rooted in love, and St Paul tells us there are only three things that last: faith, hope and love. No machine has any of the three. You have all of them.

Sixty Septembers of pupils have walked this road before you, and this evening the next chapter of the story is yours to write. Write it well. Make this school prouder still.

Congratulations to every one of you. Thank you.

I welcome our special guests tonight who are joining us in the audience and who will present awards later this evening.  I welcome my colleague Kevin McCann, who will present the Shauna McCann Memorial Award for Senior Ladies Gaelic Footballer – a beautiful award presented in loving memory of his beautiful daughter.

I extend a very special welcome back to St Paul’s to Mr Ciarán Conlon, proud father of two young lads in St Paul’s, and beloved brother of the late Brian Conlon, the founder of First Derivatives in Newry, a powerhouse of our local, regional and international economy, and we are delighted to continue and deepen our partnership and our relationship with the Brian Conlon Foundation Academic Scholarship, a very special award and substantial bursary which Ciaran will present to a worthy recipient later in tonight’s proceedings.  Ciaran you are very welcome back to St Paul’s this evening.

I am also honoured to welcome to St Paul’s the beautiful family of Gary Crossan, who join us here tonight to inaugurate a new award in Gary’s memory.   Gary was so much more than our school photographer.  He was a friend of everyone he encountered in this school and his death, at too young an age, nearly two years ago, shocked us all and has left a huge void in this family’s lives.  I am really pleased that Gary’s wife, Julie, his mum Sally, sister Mariesa and his children are here with us tonight to see his award presented – and award that will be part of this ceremony every year from now on.  I will speak more about Gary and the worthy recipient of this award later in the ceremony.   To the Crossan family, thank you for being with us this evening and you’re all very welcome.

I am glad, too, to welcome Maria and Ciara Reidy, wife and daughter of our late colleague Tommy Reidy. Tommy gave the Science department here the best part of his working life, and he died in December 2024, far too young. The Tommy Reidy Spirit of Science Award was created in his memory, and it means a great deal to us that Maria and Ciara have come back to St Paul’s this evening to present it themselves. Maria, Ciara, you are very welcome.

And finally, to our Guest of Honour and our speaker this evening.

Bishop Michael Router is a Cavan man, from Virginia, Achadh an Iúir, the place of the yew tree, and the yew still stands on his coat of arms. He was ordained for the Diocese of Kilmore in his home parish in 1989, and before he was ever a bishop he was a schoolman. He taught English, Geography and Religion at St Patrick’s College in Cavan, and he spent years as chaplain of Bailieborough Community School. So when he walks into a school, he knows exactly where he is. He knows the corridor at ten to nine. He knows the staffroom. He knows what a teenager looks like when they are pretending not to listen and hearing every word.

Since he came to Armagh as Auxiliary Bishop in 2019 he has been a real presence in this school, not a name on a letterhead. He has sat with our pupils and talked to them about the Pope St John Paul II Awards and the Muireadach Awards, and he talks to young people as if their answers matter, because to him they do. He has stood at our altar and led this whole community in the Mass that closes our year. And when this school needed a shepherd rather than a speaker, he came. Last year, when we lost our colleague Denise Hagan, Bishop Michael was here with us, and he helped us grieve. We have not forgotten it, and we will not.

Bishop Michael’s motto is In Manus Tuas, Domine. Into your hands, O Lord. That is how he has carried this school, and it is how we have felt carried.

In July the Holy Father, Pope Leo, announced that Bishop Michael is to be the new Bishop of Derry. We were delighted for him and, I will admit, a little sorry for ourselves and for the Archdiocese of Armagh. He will be installed in St Eugene’s Cathedral on Sunday week. It says everything about his kindness that he kept a promise made long before Derry called, and we are touched that one of his final engagements as Auxiliary Bishop of Armagh is with the pupils and families of St Paul’s.

Ladies and gentlemen, please give a St Paul’s welcome to our guest speaker this evening, Bishop Michael Router.