Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government
The material results have been great; the moral results perhaps even
greater. Just as we should expect, wherever education goes, and wherever
men work together for economic improvement, unnatural antagonisms of
race and religion tend to disappear. This is not the result of any
direct influence wielded by the Department, which never finds it
necessary to lecture people on the duty of mutual tolerance; it is the
result of common sense and a small experience in Home Rule. High
officials of the Department have informed me that their work, for all
intents and purposes, is unhampered by local religious prejudices. A
spirit of keen and wholesome rivalry permeates the people. County and
Borough Committees in districts almost wholly Roman Catholic, with large
powers of patronage, almost invariably appoint the best men, regardless
of creed and local influence. Anyone who wishes to gain a glimpse of the
real Belfast of the present and the future, as distinguished from the
ugly, bigoted caricature of a great city which some even of its own
citizens perversely insist on displaying to their English friends, a
Belfast as tolerant and generous as it is energetic and progressive,
should visit the magnificent Municipal Technical Institute, where 6,000
boys and girls, Roman Catholic and Protestant, mix together on equal
terms, and derive the same benefit from an extraordinary variety of
educational courses in a building furnished with lecture-rooms,
laboratories, experimental plant, and gymnasia, of a perfection hardly
to be surpassed in any city of the United Kingdom.
Here is something grand and fruitful accomplished in eleven years, and
it is the outcome, be it remembered, of original, constructive thought
devoted by Irishmen to the needs of their own country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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