An Irish-style céilí took place in the Grote Markt in the heart of the ancient city of Leuven (Louvain), in Belgium, on a Saturday evening in May earlier this year. A céií band from Ireland provided the music. Some days later, a taxi-driver told me that the people of the city were very taken by this event. This lively dance in the open air, with colourful banners surrounding the old square, marked the start of a week to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Irish College in this renowned university city.

Irish influx
While 1607 marked the start of a formal Irish institution, students had been coming to the city for several decades before this. The university was founded in 1425, and in its register the first Irish name appears in 1548.

In the year before the Flight of the Earls (1607), Florence Conry, of a Gaelic learned family in Roscommon, started to establish St. Anthony's College in the city. Like other men from a similar background in the Gaelic literary tradition at that time, Florence joined the Franciscans. Hence at the beginning of the seventeenth century the Franciscans had a strong tradition of expertise in native learning.

Due to decades of instability arising from the State-sponsored religious reformation, and the policy of conquest, it was not possible to pursue Catholic higher education in Ireland. Hence the friars decided to open a college on the continent to train priests who would serve the Catholic population at home.

Leuven Institute
Thanks to the patronage of the archduke and archduchess, rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, the college was constructed in 1616, and the building stands to this day. It was one of almost forty colleges which together comprise the university. Many of these are buildings of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, with a doorway on the street opening on to a courtyard, and often with a garden attached. Irish friars were living in the college until a few years ago, and since 1986 with the aid of the government of Ireland, the premises houses the Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe.

Leuven, located in the Spanish Netherlands, was a leading intellectual and spiritual centre for the Catholic revival which emerged in the wake of the Reformation. Students from all over Europe came here to be trained as priests who would return to their homelands and spearhead the Catholic renewal there.

Catholic heritage
It was natural that the Irish Franciscans should choose to locate their college in this university city. Here they met students and teachers from the various parts of Catholic Europe, each group conscious of their nation's long and illustrious history of saints, missioners and martyrs.

In this atmosphere, the Irish friars decided to collect and put in order materials illustrating the similarly glorious history of Ireland as a Catholic nation. In this way a historical project was launched, of great significance for the writing of Irish history in general.

The friars realized that given the wars, destruction and great changes in Ireland in recent decades, the body of manuscripts relating to the country's history was at risk of being lost. So the friars sent Brother Michael O'Clery, a man skilled in the traditional learning, back to Ireland to collect materials which would throw light on the lives of the early Irish saints.

Brother Michael travelled the country, visiting those families known to be custodians of the old manuscripts, and copied them. From this project several important works were completed in the 1630s and 1640s - the Annals of the Four Masters, and the book known as the Martyrology of Donegal. The Annals is an account of Irish history reaching back thousands of years.

John Colgan published material on the lives of the saints, entitled Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae. Taken collectively, this was a major contribution to the study of Irish history, and in this way much valuable manuscript material, of great significance for the study of Irish history in general, was preserved from destruction.

Strengthening the faith
Another major strand of the Louvain friars' contribution was in preparing catechetical material to strengthen the Irish Catholic population in their faith. To this end, the friars established an Irish printing press in their college, following the example of those promoting the reformation in Ireland, who had already published the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, together with the New Testament, in Irish.

In the 1610s, several friars published catechetical books in Irish, designed to help preachers strengthen their congregations in their loyalty to the Catholic Church. Florence Conry adapted a Catalan work for an Irish audience, inserting a long passage containing advice on how to respond to the persecution then current in Ireland.

A copy of the catechism published about 1614 by Giollabhríde O'Hussey (of an Ulster learned family) was found in the baggage of an Irish soldier serving in the Spanish Netherlands.

Similarly, Aodh Mac Aingil (Hugh MacCaughwell), from Co. Down, published a book on the sacrament of confession. The writers adopted a clear, simple, popular style, suitable for those speaking to ordinary people. This publishing work complemented the training given to scores of friars who returned to Ireland as preachers.

Soldiers and friars
The convent in Louvain was merely part of a huge migration from Ireland to the Spanish Netherlands at that time. Between 1586 and about 1620, it is estimated that about ten thousand Irish people moved to the Low Countries. Many of these were soldiers, who served in the Spanish army there.

These men brought women and children from their homeland. The friars ministered to these families, and the catechetical works already mentioned served Irish congregations at home and abroad. The friars helped the soldiers (the vast majority were illiterate) in writing letters, in making pension claims from the authorities, and in drafting wills.

There were close bonds between the Irish military and the friars. The soldiers of the Irish regiment, founded in 1605 with Henry O'Neill, son of the great O'Neill, as colonel, used to make regular collections to support the Louvain friars.

Not surprisingly it was in Louvain that the earls and their companions wintered in 1607-8, on their way from Rathmullan, Co. Donegal, to Rome, on the journey known as the Flight of the Earls. This migration had cultural implications. About four major collections of Gaelic literary material may be assigned to this Irish immigrant community in the Low Countries in the first decades of the seventeenth century.

Celebrating the past
This rich heritage was the subject of a fascinating summer school in the college in May this year. Organised by UCD's Micheál Ó Cléirigh Institute, about thirty experts gathered to discuss various aspects of the story of the Louvain friars and the Irish community of which they were a part.

A commemorative Mass was held in the Grote Begijnhof, a beautiful gothic church with soaring columns, where Irish, English and Flemish could be heard. The liturgy was enhanced by the singing of young students from the School of Music, Dublin Institute of Technology, who sang several motets from the early seventeenth century, and a version of an Irish poem composed by a friar then living in Louvain.

After the liturgy, young traditional musicians played at a reception, where Connemara sean-nós singing was heard. The library of the Catholic University of Leuven organized a display on 'The Irish in Leuven, 1607-2007', honouring the thousands of Irish students who came to Louvain over the centuries.