School records are an under-used resource in genealogy, largely because they are so dispersed, with very few online. Some are in county archives, some are in the National Archives, some are still housed in the original school and I suspect a great many more are in random places like some old principal’s attic. I’ve begun to collect locations that have school records.
National Archives of Ireland
They have produced a guide to their educational material, mainly relating to Dept of Education records but there are two small list of roll books. Access by visiting the Reading Room in Dublin.
PRONI
PRONI has an index to the school records collection, from which you take the reference and find in the ecatalogue to see more details and years covered. Access by visiting the Reading Room in Belfast.
FindmyPast
There is a small collection of records as follows:
The largest of these “Ireland National School Registers” has just under 193000 entries but gives little in the way of detail describing where it covers. As far as I can tell, it comes from a National Archives of Ireland collection, so it’s likely the 26 counties. Note too that there is a 1924 edition of Trinity College Dublin graduates.
Ancestry
They have a miscellaeneous collection and there looks to be some overlap with FMP but again, the descriptions need work. Their “National School Registers” do make it clear that they come from microfilms in the National Archives.
Familysearch has a single dataset and, once again, I think it’s a third version of the same National Archives records. However, they win a prize for actually listing every school in the collection here.
Clare Library has a great transcribed section of school registers. They also note they have more in their archive which are not yet transcribed.
Rootsireland definitely has some school registers but it’s much harder to find them because you need to check each county separately. It’s something that could be improved in their search engine.
Similarly, each of the county archives and the National Library of Ireland are likely to have some records in this category but you’ll need to consult their individual catalogues.
The Erasmus Smith Trust Schools maintain an archive and welcomes visitors.
Books
It is also worth consulting books like John Grenham’s Tracing Your Irish Ancestors (5th edition), the Directory of Irish Archives edited by Seamus Helferty & Raymond Refaussé (5th edition, though websites likely to be out of date now), the Flyleaf Press series of Tracing your Ancestors in X county or the older Irish Records: Sources for Family and Local History by James Ryan.
If you have others to add to this list, please let me know & I’ll update it.