Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Economic conditions; Land tenure -- Ireland
3. _Home Rule would involve the entire denominationalising, in the
interests of the Roman Catholic Church, of Irish education in all its
branches._ To secure this result has long been the great educational aim
of the Irish hierarchy. How they have succeeded as regards higher
education Mr. Birrell's Irish Universities Act (1908) gives abundant
evidence. The National University of Ireland, created by that Act, which
on paper was represented to Nonconformists in England as having a
constitution free from religious tests, is now, according to the recent
boast of Cardinal Logue, thoroughly Roman Catholic, in spite of all
paper safeguards to the contrary. Persistent attempts have been made to
sectarianise the Irish primary National School system, founded seventy
years ago, and which now receives an annual State endowment of
L1,621,921, with the object of safeguarding the faith of the children of
minorities, on the principle of united secular and separate religious
instruction. That system worked so satisfactorily through many decades
that Lord O'Hagan, the eminent first Roman Catholic Lord Chancellor of
Ireland, declared that under it, up till his time, no case whatever of
proselytism to any Church had occurred. But gradually a sectarian system
of education under the Roman Catholic Church was developed through the
teaching order of Christian Brothers, whose schools are now to be found
all over Ireland, and which in many places now supplant the
non-sectarian schools of the National Board. The strongest efforts were
made to bring these sectarian schools into the system of the National
Board, and thus entitle them to a share of the State annual endowment.
There is no greater peril to the religious faith of Protestant
minorities in the border counties of Ulster and elsewhere in Ireland
than the sectarianising of primary schools by Roman Catholics. A few
years ago a Protestant member of a public service was transferred upon
promotion from Belfast to a Roman Catholic district, in which his boys
had no available school but that of the Christian Brothers, and his
girls none but that of the local convent. I shall never forget the
expression of that man's face or the pathos in his voice while he
pressed me to help him to obtain a transfer to a Protestant district, as
otherwise he feared his children would be lost to the faith of their
fathers. Given a Parliament in Dublin, the management of education would
be so conducted as gradually to extinguish Protestant minorities in the
border counties of Ulster and in the other provinces of Ireland. It is
here that a chief danger to Protestantism lies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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