Present Irish Questions

by William O'Connor Morris

This sweeping measure, in my judgment at least, might have been better framed to carry out its policy. Like much of the legislation of the Imperial Parliament, it has been fashioned too closely on the English model; it gives to a poor and backward country, not trained in self-government, local institutions naturally adapted only to an opulent and well-ordered country accustomed for centuries to local liberties. Having regard to the peculiar state of Ireland, it might have made the powers of local government it conferred larger, but it ought not to have been as purely democratic as it is; and it ought to have been accompanied by safeguards it does not possess. I would have been disposed to give the Irish County Councils a right to take evidence for private Bills on the spot; this, if transmitted to the Irish Privy Council, and considered by it, might be made the basis of reports by that body, which could be turned into Acts of Parliament, by a summary process, thus getting rid of great and useless expense, and silencing one of the few real arguments in favour of Home Rule. I would also have allowed the County Councils of different counties, in matters in which they had a common interest, say, in the drainage of some of the great Irish rivers, to carry out together public works of this kind, and to assess and levy rates for the purpose if, on consideration, this was deemed expedient; at present they have no authority like this; and such a power would, I think, be for the general good of Ireland. The County Councils, too, I believe, might be given a deliberative voice, in cases they have not at present; for example, should the rate-payers of any county make a demand for sectarian education, within its area, and declare themselves ready to pay a rate for it, the County Council should have a right to entertain the project, and to report on it to the Central Government. And I am convinced that members of the County Councils ought to have some seats on the Local Government Board, and on other boards now filled by the Castle bureaucracy; this would introduce a popular element into these bodies, and, in many ways, would be of real advantage. On the other hand, in the election and the constitution of the County and other Councils, democracy has simply been let run riot; and the resulting evils have already been made manifest. Illiterate persons ought not to have been qualified to be electors; the single should not have replaced the cumulative vote, property being thus deprived of its legitimate weight; above all, as is evident, security should have been taken that the landed gentry should have a proper representation on the County Councils. The authority, too, of the Superior Courts over all these assemblies should have been made more effective and less costly than it is at present; and that of the Local Government Board should have been better defined and increased. In all this province the checks possessed by the Central Government over these local democracies are not, I think, sufficient.

It is impossible, I have remarked, to say with certainty what the end of this social revolution will be; but some of the results are, even now, apparent. There has, as yet, been little tendency in the local boards to waste, or to attempts to despoil the landed gentry; the check in this respect is of great force; but no one, I repeat, can predict what may be done under the influence of democratic sympathies, especially should the existing agitation acquire increased strength in Ireland. Some of the councils have been very fairly managed; a few others have been badly administered; as a rule, much time has been misspent in irrelevant talk; there has been a good deal of squabbling with the Local Government Board; but, on the whole, the local business of the counties and towns has been conducted as reasonably well as could be expected in the case of a new and immense experiment. But the consequences of giving raw democracies great and sudden power have already been made but too manifest, as persons, who knew Ireland, foresaw would happen. In parts of Ulster representatives of the landed gentry have been elected to the County Councils; property in these has still legitimate influence. But in Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, this order of men has been all but completely shut out from these boards; the land is not represented at all; this is an absolutely unnatural position of affairs, pregnant with many ills to the community as a whole. It is not only that the landed gentry have been deprived of an influence they ought to possess, in a society in any degree well ordered; this change has a tendency to make them more and more, what they have largely been made already, a privileged class without duties, akin to the old seigneurie of France, a state of things of which Tocqueville has powerfully described the evils. In the southern provinces, too, the new democracies, composed of Catholic ‘Nationalists,’ by large majorities, have driven loyal, and especially Protestant, men and women from local offices they had filled with credit, and this too at a considerable charge on the rates, a clear proof how no restraints can be wholly effective. But the main feature in the conduct of the County and other Councils is that in most parts of Ireland they have followed the advice given by Parnell to their weaker forerunners; they have made themselves agencies of the United Irish League, as boards before them were agencies of the Land and the National Leagues, and they have given but too ample proof of disaffection, disloyalty, and hatred of British rule. In some counties, the councils seized the court houses, and refused light and fire to the Superior and the County Court judges. Throughout the South of Ireland most of the boards vied with each other in wild expressions of sympathy with the Boers, and of hopes that disaster would befall the British army; many gave free voice to frankly rebellious language; many denounced Irishmen being recruited for the British army. Nor did these sinister exhibitions end here; some of these bodies went out of their way to sneer at their aged sovereign, when she paid last year her last visit to the Irish shores, to question her motives, to speak all kinds of evil; a few even refused to say a word of regret for her death, nay, indulged in language of scarcely veiled insult. These councils, in a word, in a number of instances, have shown a marked resemblance to the Assemblies of the Communes of Jacobin France, indignantly held up to execration by Burke; they have been petty nests of seditious agitation and clamour. It is at least well that this manner of men has not succeeded, in the great statesman’s language, in ‘ascending from parochial tyranny to federal anarchy’ and have warned us what would be the nature of a Home Rule Parliament.

This scheme of local government must be given a trial; but ultimately it will have to be reformed, in a Conservative sense, if things in Ireland are not to be left upside down.[184] I turn to the subject of Irish education, which has been lately attracting much public attention. University education is the most prominent part of this question; but, in order to understand it, we must briefly consider the history of Irish education in all its branches. The first scheme of primary education in Ireland, of which we have a record—I pass over the traditions of the Middle Ages—was due to the policy of Henry VIII.; he procured an Act from the Irish Parliament, to the effect that elementary schools should be set up in different Irish parishes; but, true to the ideal of Tudor statesmen—an ideal, however, which he did not always pursue—he required that these should be ‘English schools,’ to teach the Irish poor ‘the English language.’ Many years passed before these schools were found beyond the borders of the Pale; but, as the march of conquest advanced, they existed in many Irish parishes; there were more than five hundred of them in 1810, the largest number probably they ever attained. These schools were originally intended to be open without distinction of creed; but, under the conditions of Irish history, they necessarily became confined to the lower Protestant classes; they were under the control of the clergy of the Established Church, and Catholic children were kept away from them. Elizabeth founded another class of schools, in part elementary, in part of a higher type; these were known as the Diocesan Irish Schools; but there seem never to have been more than sixteen of these; and they, too, became exclusively Protestant. To these schools should be added ‘the English Erasmus Smith Schools,’ as they were called, foundations grafted, so to speak, on grammar schools established by a wealthy Cromwellian settler; at one time they were more than one hundred in number; and if not wholly, they were nearly confined to Protestant children. A series of Reports of Commissions and other records show that the education afforded in all these schools was not what it ought to have been; but this was to be expected in the case of a country where Protestant ascendency was supreme, where all administration was selfish and corrupt, and where the schools were the monopoly of a fraction of the people only. As to the education of the Irish Catholic poor in these centuries, it was discouraged, and ultimately prohibited by the penal code; the Catholic child could not learn the rudiments in his own land; but in spite of this, ‘hedge schools,’ a significant name, grew up, in hundreds, throughout the country, in which, to adopt the words of Davis, a man of genius—

‘Still crouching ’neath the sheltering hedge, or stretched on mountain fern,
The teacher and his pupils met feloniously to learn.’

As may, however, be supposed the instruction afforded in these schools was usually bad; throughout the eighteenth century and a part of the nineteenth, the young of Catholic Ireland were brought up in ignorance. In 1733 an odious experiment was made, and continued for a long period, to cause education to wean the Catholic child from his faith. An institution, called the Charter School, was established; the object of its founders was to make ‘the young of the Papists’ Protestant, by attracting them to seminaries where they were kept apart from their parents and priests, boarded, lodged, and handed over to Protestant tradesmen; millions were spent in furthering a detestable policy, which literally set up Mammon against God. The Charter Schools, however, completely failed; they never had more than fourteen hundred pupils, and they became wretched Dotheboys Halls where cruel and pampered Squeerses, eating up funds set apart for education such as it was, starved and ill-treated children victims of every kind of disease.

When the partial relaxation of the penal laws allowed the children of the Irish Catholics to be taught the rudiments, the ‘Christian Brothers’ began to found their schools, under the sanction of a Bull of Pius VI.; these schools, sectarian, like the genius of the Irish people, have, though receiving no endowment from the State, grown from small beginnings into a number of excellent Catholic schools. The Quakers in Ireland had established a few elementary schools before the Union; and so had the Presbyterians of Ulster. The Charter Schools lingered down to the year 1832; they disappeared when their subsidies ceased; but the ‘Incorporated Irish Society’ is in possession of the lands they once held, and it supports a number of good Protestant schools. Primary education, however, in Ireland remained very backward; the Protestant schools did not flourish; the Catholic ‘hedge schools’ continued until the nineteenth century had far advanced. Attempts were made to promote Irish primary education, in different ways, after the Union; a Board of Commissioners of Education was appointed, and made valuable reports; but these efforts were of little avail for the benefit at least of the Catholic young; the schools thus established were all Protestant; and the evangelical movement, which was then powerful, made them proselytising with scarcely a single exception, a danger which the example of the Charter Schools had especially made the Catholic Irish priesthood dread. An institution, however, called the ‘Kildare Place Schools’ had, for a time, considerable success; these schools were thrown open to children of all creeds, and had the high approval of O’Connell himself; but it was one of the rules that the Bible should be read in the schools; they became proselytising in no doubtful sense, and ultimately they were tabooed by the Catholic priesthood. Primary education in Ireland was in this state, when the subject was taken up by Mr. Stanley, the Chief Secretary for Ireland of Lord Grey, and, in after years, the ‘Rupert of Debate.’ He founded in 1831-34 what has ever since been known as the ‘National System of Education’ of an elementary kind in Ireland. The principles on which he proceeded were in accord with the somewhat shallow Liberalism of the day, but, it must be added, with the ideas of many enlightened Irishmen. Primary education was to be endowed by the State, but it was to be divided into two parts: secular instruction was to be given in the new schools to children assembled together to learn, and that without distinction of creed; but religious instruction was to be given to children kept apart, Protestants and Catholics being completely separate, by the pastors of their respective communions. By these means it was hoped that a sound system of primary education would be formed; that proselytising would be made impossible; and that the youth of the warring races and faiths of Ireland, under the influence of a common teaching, would be made gradually to forget the animosities of the past. The National Schools were to be the Lethe of Irish discords.

I can barely glance at the chequered history of the institution which was thus established. The ‘National System,’ the name long in common use, was angrily condemned by the clergy of the Established Church of Ireland, and by a majority, perhaps, of the laity; this opposition was partly due to the spirit of an ascendency that would not brook equality; but it was largely to be ascribed to a higher motive. The new system, it was argued, cut education in two; the separation of what is secular from what is religious practically postpones what is divine to the human; and this is especially the case under the arrangements in force, for religious instruction in the schools may be a mere accident. The Irish Protestant clergy, and many other Protestants, have never taken to the National Schools; their sincerity is proved by the fact that a ‘Church Education Society’ exists, which, though depending on voluntary subscriptions alone, supports nearly two hundred exclusively Protestant schools. As for the Presbyterians of Ireland, the National system of education fell in with their views; its ‘Liberalism’ was congenial to them; but though schools of this type have flourished in Ulster, the Presbyterians have given a great deal of trouble to the Commissioners charged to carry out the law, and have shown much animosity to the Catholic Irish. The Irish Catholic priesthood at first accepted the National system almost with gratitude; it gave their flocks a rudimentary instruction they were much in need of; it seemed to provide against the proselytising they feared above all things; and during some years the heads of their Church in Ireland, for the most part not of the Ultramontane faith, were not indisposed to welcome a compromise. By degrees, however, opposition grew up in Catholic Ireland against the system; and, it must be allowed, not without reason. The Catholic element on the Commission was much too weak; the purely secular instruction in the schools was made partly religious, for books of a Protestant complexion found their way into them; a cry of Protestant proselytising was raised; and the National system was solemnly condemned in 1850, at the great Catholic Synod of Thurles, a sentence, however, which had no effect on the Government. But the real grievances of the Irish Catholics, in this matter, have nearly all been removed; the Catholic Commissioners have been made equal in number with the Presbyterian and Protestant; secular instruction in the schools has again been made strictly secular; attempts at proselytising have long been rendered impossible; it should be added—and this is very important—the Catholic priesthood have become the managers of a large majority of the schools. The system has certainly struck deep roots in Ireland; there are now nearly 9000 National Schools, endowed with about £1,300,000 by the State, and teaching nearly 800,000 pupils; they are supported by model and training schools, and have a large staff of competent teachers; the instruction they afford, if not remarkable, is, on the whole, sufficiently good. It may fairly be said that the National system has been a beneficent influence of the greatest value; light has shone on a people that once sate in darkness. The system, however, has become, insensibly, but greatly, changed; the National Schools have long been, for the most part, sectarian, that is, composed of Protestant or of Catholic children; the ‘mixed’ schools, as they are called, are comparatively few. But the main principle of the system still is in force; the instruction given in the schools, when the pupils sit together, is strictly secular; and this is secured by a conscience clause; the Bible cannot be read, in school hours, even in a Protestant school; no Catholic school can have a Catholic emblem. The religious instruction given in the schools is hardly what it ought to be, especially in the case of the Protestant schools; it must be added that the hope of their founders that they would bridge over the gulf of discords in Ireland has not been, in the slightest degree, realised.

The Irish are, naturally, a religious people; their history, a long conflict of races and faiths, has, necessarily, made them intensely sectarian. The system of education, of which I have traced the outlines, was certainly not well designed for them; it would have been severely condemned by Burke, the deepest of thinkers on the affairs of Ireland. And though the National system has had a real measure of success, it owes this, in the main, to the immense subvention it receives from the State; it has little or no support from voluntary aid; an attempt to impose an education rate on Ireland would be a failure, would not improbably wreck the system. Nor is this in harmony with genuine Irish sentiment; one of the most conclusive proofs is that National education has become, to a great extent, sectarian; the ‘Christian Brothers’ and the ‘Church Education Society’ schools, sustained by voluntary effort alone, and overweighted in the race by the endowed schools of the State, show how strong is Irish sectarian feeling. The clergy, too, of the late Established Church, and a considerable body of their communion, remain hostile to the National Schools; and though the Catholic priesthood have made them, to a great extent, their own, and avail themselves of the advantages they afford, they are hardly in heartfelt sympathy with them. Nor can it be denied that the conscientious objections to the National system have real weight; the system, if not irreligious, is, we may say, neutral; it does not make religion an essential part of school life. It would, nevertheless, I believe, be exceedingly unwise to disturb a system which, on the whole, has for many years had excellent results in Ireland. The opposition to it is not strong; the children of the humbler classes freely avail themselves of it, and that with the full consent of their parents. Nor is the conscientious objection of much force in the case of schools which are only day schools, and in which the rudiments alone are taught; this is not the case of education of the higher kind, in which this objection is perhaps decisive; and it cannot be said that the National Schools have, in any sense, impaired the religion of the Irish people.[185]

I pass from elementary to schools of a secondary kind in Ireland. The Diocesan Schools of Elizabeth were nearly all secondary schools; but they were never numerous, and have all but disappeared. The two first Stuarts made an attempt to establish secondary education in Ireland on a larger scale. They founded the ‘Free Royal Schools,’ as they have been called, now seen at Armagh, Cavan, Dungannon, Portora, and Raphoe; they endowed them with lands perhaps worth in our day, £6000 a year; they looked forward to a time when they might rival Eton, Winchester, and the great public schools of England. Erasmus Smith established three considerable ‘grammar schools,’ and granted valuable estates for their support; a tolerably large number of secondary schools was also founded, from time to time, by benefactors of the dominant race in Ireland: of these Kilkenny College, a seminary created by the House of Ormond, which reared Swift and Berkeley, was the most conspicuous. These schools, though often nominally open to different creeds, became, nevertheless, in the eighteenth century, under the Protestant ascendency, supreme in the land, restricted to the young of the Protestant caste; they felt the effects of monopoly, and of the corruption prevailing in the State; the education they afforded was, for the most part, bad; their governing bodies and masters were often grasping and selfish. After the relaxation of the penal code, the Irish Catholics began to found secondary schools; their exertions were, in a high degree, praiseworthy; and though these schools received no support from the State, some of them have done really excellent work. A number, too, of secondary schools were established in Ulster, for the most part for Presbyterian uses; some of these are sectarian, some open to all faiths; some have, others have not, received assistance from the State; in several the education given has been, on the whole, good. A few secondary schools—St. Columba is much the best—have also been founded within the last century, usually for the benefit of the late Established Church of Ireland.

The progress made by secondary schools in Ireland, even in the nineteenth century, has not been rapid. It is not to be named with the immense development of public schools in England, within the same period, caused, in some measure, by the genius of Arnold; secondary Irish schools, in fact, have been largely a failure, like other institutions of British origin. This is mainly to be attributed to three reasons: the higher upper classes in Ireland usually send their sons to be educated in the great English public schools; the Irish secondary schools are seldom well endowed; above all, the upper middle class in Ireland is small and has little influence. Two Commissions, appointed in 1854 and in 1878, examined secondary education in Ireland as it then existed; their reports give a far from favourable account of the system. The secondary Irish schools have not been much affected by an Act of Parliament passed in 1885, which provided for making better schemes for their management; but certainly they have derived very great benefit from the Intermediate Education Act of Lord Cairns, which established a system of competition between them, and secured prizes for successful competitors. In these honourable trials the Catholic schools have done well; but even now the secondary schools are decidedly inferior to what they ought to be, and do not exhibit many signs of improvement. An impartial inquirer thus described them in 1871:[186] ‘Upon the whole, secondary instruction, throughout the country, was as some one—I believe Lord Cairns—said, “bad in quality and deficient in quantity.” The fact seems incredible, but there can be no doubt of its authenticity, viz. that out of a total population of 5,500,000, there were only 10,814 boys in Ireland learning Latin, Greek, or modern languages in 1871. Or, to put the matter in another way, while in England about ten or fifteen in every 1000 were instructed in these languages, only two in every 1000 were instructed in them in Ireland.’[187]