Then in 1831 the British government suddenly reversed its long-standing policy and established the system of ‘National’ schools, to provide universal free primary education. This was not done in England for another fifty years.
This remarkable initiative was not due to any new-found affection for the Irish, it arose from an upsurge of agrarian unrest, the so-called Tithe War, which had given the authorities a nasty fright. Assessing the Tithe War, they concluded that it was caused by an inbred Irish impulse to insubordination.(Many English visitors of the time had contrasted the insolent stares of the Irish peasantry with the submissive bows of their own tenants.)
The new National schools would give a very rudimentary training in the three R’s but their hidden and principal function was to teach the Irish habits of obedience and grovelling. Teachers were required to enforce strict discipline with the aid of corporal punishment, and a system of inspectors was established to make sure they did.
An important second hidden agenda was the elimination of the Irish language and the conversion of the Irish into monoglot English speakers. When about the year 1880 some Protestant clergy objected to the expenditure of public funds on the education of Catholic children one member of the Board of Education, the economist Professor Cairnes, responded with a set of statistics showing the decline in the number of Irish speakers since the National School system was established.
Among the religious orders, who ran most of the secondary schools, there were also plenty of good teachers but here again the bad ones had free rein. Perversely, it was sometimes thought that to dislike children was actually spiritually beneficial because it gave teaching a penitential aspect.
The National Schools remained virtually unchanged until about thirty years ago. Corporal punishment, administered with various weapons, was the main educational aid. The aim of creating a standard product was maintained: children who were slow or clumsy were the target of continuous physical punishment and there was a particularly cruel and pointless persecution of children who were left-handed. It was only after about 1960 that the system began to soften a little: largely because of the odium it attracted internationally.
The situation was made worse by the fact that the retirement age for women teachers was seventy years, and that women teachers who married were required to resign. Because of this the primary system became clogged with a cohort of old spinsters waiting on their pensions. Younger teachers, who might have introduced improvements, tended to leave in frustration: getting out by marriage or falling to recruitment raids from education boards in Britain.
In the Six Counties the Stormont regime fought the reform tooth-and-nail because it meant they would have to allow equality of opportunity for Catholics and Protestants, but London forced it on them anyway. The Stormont education minister, Colonel Hall-Thompson, became the target of so much personal abuse from Protestant clergy and the Orange Order that he had to resign. In the Saorstát the Eleven-Plus was praised to the skies both by those journalists who specialised in applauding everything English and denigrating everything Irish and by whichever political party was in opposition.
In fact the Eleven-Plus had serious defects. Well-to-do parents sent their children to tutors to be taught how to get through the tests and thus obtain free the education their parents could well afford to pay for. Also there was the problem of the 90% who did not pass the Eleven-Plus. These were placed in what were called Secondary-Modern schools, in which classes were larger and teachers were paid less and which had a content-deficient curriculum. Their function was mainly to keep kids off the streets until they were old enough to start work. Eventually these schools developed such a bad name that they were renamed Comprehensive Schools and within them a system known as ‘streaming’ was introduced, under which the brighter pupils were isolated from the rest and coached to have a go at the O-level exams. This appears to have been partly a sop to teacher morale.
Though there were frequent calls to bring in the Eleven-Plus in the Saorstát, in practice there was no chance the politicians would agree. Pupils who got through would owe their success to an anonymous examiner, not to the local TD, while the parents of the 90% rejected would be pounding on the doors of the politicians’ clinics.
Gradually, trust in the Department of Finance began to fade and Leinster House politicians were converted to Keynesian economic theory (a sure sign that it was out of date) and began spending money they didn’t have like there was no tomorrow. At this point Donough O’Malley arrived on the scene.
Donough O’Malley controlled the Fianna Fáil party organization in Limerick and became a powerful player in the internal brokering that followed the retirement of de Valera and had to be rewarded or bought off with a portfolio. He was put in charge of education, a traditional “sleepwalker’s corner” in the cabinet.
O’Malley developed a habit of getting up at functions while intoxicated and announcing new departures in education of which neither his department nor his cabinet colleagues had any prior knowledge. At one time he might have got away with this, but a new and powerful player had arrived on the Irish political scene: television. Each ministerial announcement would spawn an immediate round of live interviews, talk-show discussions and so on.
Some proposals came to nothing; for example an announcement that TCD and UCD were to be amalgamated. But in November 1966 O’Malley suddenly proclaimed that the State was going to introduce free secondary education for all. He was taken at his word by the media and the government was unable to back down. (O’Malley himself was transferred to the Department of Health, and perversely dropped dead soon afterwards.)
How to pay for it all? Traditionally the Saorstát had got what little secondary education there was cheaply through reliance on the religious orders, but this was more than the teaching orders - already beginning to decline - could cope with unaided. The government was obliged to go to the World Bank in search of a loan.
The World Bank is a body based in New York, loosely attached to the United Nations, that provides loans to governments. It is in theory independent of any particular State but raises funds on the New York money market and is basically American-run.
It was alleged that the World Bank had placed stringent conditions on the loan, giving it virtual control over education policy, and that the Saorstát had been directed to base the new secondary school system on Anglo-American models. This was vehemently denied, but it was noticed that some senior officials at the Department of Education went on protracted trips to the United States to study the school system there.
They picked a bad time. In the United States the school system had been all but destroyed by pressures brought by educational theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, sexologists and crackpots who between them had the schools doing everything but teaching. The whole set-up was devastatingly described by Rudolf Fleich in his book Why Johnny Can’t Read.
Finding the blackboard jungles of America unsuitable, they turned instead to England, and decided to adopt the Comprehensive School system there as a model. But by this time that name had in turn developed odious connotations, so the term Community Schools was adopted instead.
Driven by the World Bank, the basic strategy was THINK BIG! The ideal school size, irrespective of level, was to be about 2,000 pupils. At the primary level about 1,000 rural schools were closed with the pupils being brought by bus into the nearest town. This had a devastating effect on rural areas, especially in the Gaeltacht, and did much to accelerate rural decline.
It wasn’t long before, as previously in Britain and America, the requirements of social engineering began to eclipse those of education. The beginning of the Northern troubles in 1969 left the Saorstát’s political pundits and media gurus gasping for breath. How could the blame for all this be transferred to the Irish: leaving England without stain of guilt?
The answer they came up with was that the problem was due entirely to reading Wicked History Books. So, the schools must put things right. Children must be taught that Cromwell was really quite a decent old stick, the Penal Laws were fairly mild, the Famine had been grossly exaggerated and even the Black and Tans were Not All Bad. Schools were urged to introduce modules on ‘Peace Studies’ and the like.
While it is true that a number of distinguished Irish patriots studied at Trinity (Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and Thomas Davis are examples, and Pádraic Pearse did a law degree there), Trinity has for the most part been a centre of hostility to Ireland and things Irish and a ‘Little England’ enclave.
As a sort of half-way measure the British established the ‘Queens Colleges’ in Belfast, Cork and Galway. These were state funded, were not connected with any church, though at first they employed only Protestant lecturers. The Catholic hierarchy rejected these ‘Godless Colleges’ and forbade Catholics to attend them. Instead an attempt was made to set up a specifically Catholic university in Dublin using private funds. It was a small affair, struggling on for many years: harassed by the authorities and constantly being sued by cranks - no doubt with semi- official encouragement. One section was left in peace: the Medical School in Cecelia Street. The British Empire was desperately short of doctors and medical training was very expensive and they were happy to see doctors being supplied from a privately-funded institution.
In 1908 the British established the National University of Ireland, which consisted of the old Queens Colleges in Cork and Galway plus the previous Catholic academy which was reconstituted as University College Dublin. It seems that with Home Rule looming on the horizon Dublin Castle was anxious to set up a self-perpetuating university body that would continue to look after British interests when direct interference would no longer be as easy. The NUI was not connected with any religion, the only concession being that in their lectures staff were not allowed to attack Catholic church doctrines.
The medical faculties were the largest and best-funded. A Trinity don commented that the Catholic bishops had gone after a glorified seminary and had ended up with a glorified medical school.
The strong links between Trinity, Dublin Castle and the Anglican church continued. When in 1919 the provost (the Gael-baiting Mahaffey) died; the Protestant archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Bernard, became provost while the runner-up, Rev. Gregg, took over as archbishop. But while Gregg and Bernard were playing musical chairs, things were happening not too far away. Dáil Éireann assembled and the war of liberation began. In Trinity there was vehement hostility, and in all other institutions of higher learning staff mostly remained aloof, while trying to guess ‘which way the cat would jump.’ Many students, however, participated in the struggle and two UCD students were hanged in Mountjoy for Republican activities: Kevin Barry on 1st November 1920 and Frank Flood on 14th March 1921.
The senior staff at all the NUI colleges were largely drawn from the ‘Castle Catholic’ element and were at best indifferent to the struggle for independence, but as the independence movement gained strength they began to trim their sails to the new wind that was blowing. In November 1921, in the hiatus period between the ‘Truce’ and the ‘Treaty’, the NUI elected Éamon De Valera as Chancellor: a post he retained for the rest of his long life. De Valera was a man of meagre academic achievement, and the electors of the NUI had little sympathy with his politics, but he was presumed to be the coming man and the NUI wanted to ingratiate themselves as quickly as possible. The following month when the treaty was unexpectedly signed the academics switched their support immediately from Republicanism to Neo-Colonialism.
Meanwhile, fearful of the future, in Galway the president of UCG had the massive stone lion-and-unicorn above the city courthouse removed and concealed in the garden of the president’s residence, where it can still be seen sticking up among the shrubbery. In Cork the president of UCC had the college’s statue of the Famine Queen secretly buried: it was recently exhumed and put up again ‘as a tribute to her contribution to education’, which somebody said was like putting up a statue of Hitler to honour his contribution to postcard design.
Trinity was the best-funded institution. It had substantial income from rents and ground-rents and previously the British government had given it a large annual grant. The 1920 ‘Government of Ireland Act’ had required the government of ‘Southern Ireland’ to continue this grant, but in the 1921 treaty the matter was overlooked. Provost Bernard approached Cosgrave and got his grant readily enough, but the new Department of Finance insisted on an itemised annual report on how the grant had been spent. This was rather embarrassing because traditionally a portion of the grant had been used to restock the college’s ample wine-cellar. Trinity remained a Unionist enclave, contemptuous of the Saorstát. The Union Jack was flown above the main gate, banquets began with a prayer for the British monarchy and ended with ‘God Save the King’.
The NUI blundered on regardless. There continued to be an over-emphasis on medical training: producing far more doctors and dentists than the country could employ. Academic staff in a well-run university should spend about half their time teaching and the other half doing research. In both NUI and Trinity very little research was done: partly due to shortage of facilities and funding, partly because so many academics were up to their elbows in right-wing politics and partly because frankly the general quality of the staff was by international standards fairly poor. Appointments and promotions were cursed by the clientelist system, under which no account was taken of ability or suitability.
De Valera himself actually soon established friendly relations with Trinity. The NUI was packed with Cumann na nGaedheal nominees while Trinity had remained aloof from Free State politics and more or less had clean hands. In his 1937 Constitution de Valera allocated three seats in his ‘Senate’ to the NUI and another three to Trinity. The NUI senators were normally Fine Gaelers of embarrassing right-wingedness while the men of Trinity appear to have demonstrated their contempt for the Saorstát by nominating the three biggest jackasses they could find.
The Second World War caused a fall-off in student numbers, as many potential students enlisted either at home or abroad. By late 1940 the international situation looked so grim that in Trinity the dons began drinking their way through the college’s stocks of vintage port and champagne for fear the Germans, or even worse the Irish, might lay their hands on it.
In 1945 following the collapse of Germany some Trinity students climbed onto the roof of the college and carried out a pro-British demonstration during which an Irish flag was burned. A major counter-demonstration assembled outside the college gates and stones were thrown and windows broken. Thereafter, Trinity began to abandon the more ostentatious aspects of its Unionist sympathies.
After the war the British government decided to set up a major public health service, and the Saorstát’s universities were soon back at work contributing to the supply of medical personnel.
If a person wished to pursue research in Celtic philology, or Brehon Law, or ancient Irish literature, then the RAI was quite useless and the student had to go off to Paris or Munich or Oslo or some other foreign location. To put an end to this ridiculous situation De Valera established the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. This was intended originally to concentrate on Celtic studies but the arrival in Ireland of high-calibre refugees enabled a more generalised institute to be established: with faculties of astronomy, cosmic physics and the like.
Several times there have been proposals to reform the third-level structure but nothing has ever been done and the structure remains much as it was inherited from the British. The only significant recent development came in 1988, when a polytechnic in Limerick City was elevated to university status. This was done purely for party political purposes in the run-up to an election, to quench local anger over the closure of a hospital.
There is also the problem of the low level of research activity. Research is a vital component of university life, and without it a college degenerates into a diploma mill. There are strong connections with England at third level. In the academic careers area Ireland and Britain function as a single unit. Links with, and movement between, universities in different countries are of course desirable and useful: but the links with Britain are far too close and constitute something of a strangle-hold.
In some areas, especially legal and historical studies, the interconnections are very tight indeed. Also, almost all the text books set in Irish universities are the work of English academics.