One of the effects of the French Revolution was the loss to Ireland of innumerable seminaries on the continent, particularly in France where these colleges were most numerous and the largest of all was at Paris itself. The Irish Dominicans lost their largest college at Louvain in 1794, while those at Rome and Lisbon practically ceased to receive students until napoleon met his Waterloo in 1815. This was a serious set-back for recruitment and training. The diocesan clergy managed better, thanks to the foundation of Maynooth (1795) and the existence of slightly earlier colleges at Kilkenny and Carlow. Nonetheless, even the bishops found it hard to staff parishes for a period of 20 years and turned to the religious Orders for pastors and curates. This was a further blow to isolated country priories whose few surviving members were drawn into parishes while their ‘convents’, such as they were, disappeared forever. That is why, in Connacht, only the houses of Sligo and Galway survive today.
James Thomas French, already prior at the Claddagh in 1777, built a new priory in 1792 and a new church in 1800 to replace the “thatched chapel” which may have been the one St Oliver Plunkett so much admired in 1674. The church survived until 1891.
In 1846, during the Famine, Fr Thomas Rush built the ‘Claddagh National Piscatory School’ where six hundred children learned the arts of making nets and lace. This later became an ordinary national School which was entrusted to the diocesan clergy in 1892. But the time of the Famine, the total number of Dominicans in Ireland had dropped to about 50, but this was soon to change with the building of a novitiate-house at Tallaght, Co. Dublin, in 1856. It was the first proper novitiate and house of studies which the Irish Dominicans ever had on home soul, and the first master of novices was Fr Tom Burke, the famous preacher. Fr Burke was from Galway, and his statue now stands in his native city.