Farewell Mr Robert Marshall

Administration

The difficulty remembering Rob’s time at Trinity is the danger of leaving out something significant that Rob contributed in his time at the college. Rob was a student of Trinity in the class of ’75. In those days, he wore his hair long as was the fashion. He returned in 1979, to be Trinity Sports Master from 1980 to 1990. When he was head of PE he shared an office under the back of Gibney Hall in what is now the boardroom. Rob came back in 1997 and stayed until the end of Term Two 2004 as Deputy and acting Head of Secondary Rob worked very hard and long hours. He was president of PSA and president of CSDPA. Being a former sports master, he was passionate about the school's athletics and devoted a great deal of time to the development of this year's successful team. He was also involved in tennis coaching, pastoral council, academic council, the all schools Edmund Rice Mass in 2002, TOBA, Edmund Rice Outreach, founding “parent” of the Senior Enterprise programme, camps, uniform committee, IT committee, numerous working parties, timetabling, speech night, supervisions, exams, assemblies, tours, reports, RE, policy documentation, CEO committees and the list goes on.

All these commitments spelled hard work and late nights. It was not out of the ordinary for emails from Rob to show times two or three o’clock in the morning. Through all of this Rob was a man who always had time for the individual student or staff member. “No” was not a word in his vocabulary when it came to requests made of his time. He expected no less from others. He was unbending when it came to getting the results he expected. He would say to the students ‘you have to take it to another level’.

Rob was a person who believed in the ‘one percenters’ – the details man. Many things fell into place around Trinity because of Rob’s organisational skills and attention to detail. We might regard most people who pay so much attention to detail as obsessive, but there was another side of Rob. As a counsellor, he always found the positive angle, never showing even the slightest hint of frustration or anger. Rob Marshall could persuade parents who were fuming that someone had maligned their son, to smiling and admitting that their son needed to mend his ways. Students remember him as patient and caring, and not one to lose his cool. Staff members wondered why, when they went into his office with a “mission”, they walked out pondering how they had been talked into a different perspective. Few know of the concern Rob showed to individual old boys, and families in crisis – using his contacts to get old boys part time jobs, or assisting a particular old boy who has a mental health problem. He was a quiet achiever who could be very persuasive. We miss him. We wish him well in his new position as Deputy Principal, of Chisholm College where he will certainly be an inestimable asset as he was to Trinity.

Stefan Puertollano sings farewell.