THE present examination points system would have shown the poet and patriot Thomas Davis to be a miserable failure, Mr Frank Feely, a former Dublin city manager, told the second annual autumn school of the Thomas Davis Commemoration Committee in Mallow, Co Cork.
Mr Feely said the points system failed to measure qualities such as Davis had in abundance.
His biographers have been at pains to emphasise Davis's academic shortcomings, according to Mr Feely. If a child came home today with the kind of school report which Davis would have earned, his confidence would be destroyed, Mr Feely said. Yet Davis, who died before he was 31, had enormous achievements to his credit.
In failing to measure personal qualities, the points system failed to give a true measure of an individual and sapped their confidence, Mr Feely added.
The school was also told that the chief relevance of Davis today was as an advocate of reconciliation. He burnt himself out defining a nationality which would embrace "the Irishman of a hundred generations and the stranger who is within our gates", said historian Brendan O Cathaoir on Saturday.
Davis's last words on the North were: "Surely our Protestant brethren cannot shut their eyes to the honour it would confer on them and us if we gave up old brawls and bitterness, and came together in love like Christians, in feeling like countrymen, in policy like men having common interests. Can they ah, tell us, dear countrymen, can you harden your hearts at the thought of looking on Irishmen joined in commerce, agriculture, art, justice, government, wealth and glory?"
In 1845, Orange rallies had illustrated "our broken condition. It was a poor display of childish rage to meet and shout the watch words whose significance has passed away forever".
Irish Catholics held out their hands in supplication, asking Orangemen "to relinquish their old enmities and to form a new friendship, to endure for ever".