Our school system drew its sole authority from a letter written by the chief secretary for Ireland, writes Garret Fitzgerald.
OUR STATE-organised national school system has many remarkable features. First of all, it was founded almost 40 years before a state system of education was established in any part of Britain. However, for the first 150 years of its existence, the Irish national school system had no legislative foundation, Until as late as the 1990s, our national school system drew its sole authority from a letter written by the chief secretary for Ireland, Edward Stanley, (later Lord Derby), to Augustus FitzGerald, Duke of Leinster.
The original of this letter disappeared and two different versions of it in the British parliamentary papers diverge on six significant matters, as well as on many other details.
Moreover, a surprising feature of this document, to me at least, is that both versions of this letter describe what was being established as a "system of national education in Ireland". No one seems to have quarrelled with the implication that Ireland was a nation - which I had the impression was contested in Britain then, and for a long time thereafter.
Next, our national schools were explicitly made non-denominational. This was done to meet the views of the Catholic hierarchy which had been "brought to favour an un-denominational system of state-provided education by the activities of the Protestant proselytising societies"*. But the principle of mixed schools with joint religious management, upon which this letter was insistent, was never enforced and the effective opting out of joint management by the Anglican and Presbyterian churches, in combination with the overwhelmingly predominance of Catholics in so many rural areas, ensured that within 20 years, the national schools had become de facto denominational, with Catholic bishops installed in most of them as school patrons.
Why was the national school system created at so early a stage in the 19th century? An 1824 survey of Irish education by the British parliament, based on returns made by all Catholic parish priests and Anglican rectors, had revealed that at that time there were already almost 12,000 schools, educating some 570,000 children.
Eighty per cent of these schools, accommodating 70 per cent of these children, although officially described as "Pay-Schools" - were still popularly known as "Hedge Schools". In fact by that time these schools had all come in from the hedges under which they had often sheltered prior to the legalisation of Catholic education in 1782. At worst, they were now to be found in barns or, more often, in "wretched mud cabins" to quote a common description in the 1824 survey. Some, however, were given shelter in buildings provided by local landlords.
(A Tipperary farmer, who I believe was my paternal great-great-grandfather, had a spacious room built on to his house by his landlord in 1836 so that he could teach "Latin and sums" to local children at night).
A preliminary analysis of this 1824 material - of which I am currently undertaking a detailed study - suggests that in many urban areas and also in what were then the more prosperous rural areas of the southeast the parents were paying for up to half of their sons and one-third of their daughters to be educated, mostly in these former "hedge schools". However, in much poorer Connacht, the proportion of children at school was much lower, and, for reasons that I have yet to establish, in prosperous Ulster the proportion of children at school seems to have been 15 per cent lower than in Leinster and Munster.
The fees paid in many rural schools in what was then the poorest country in Europe outside the Turkish empire may seem to us very modest but even four to eight shillings a year per child was a significant amount to spend.
Thus it is clear that for the Catholic three-quarters of the population state-financed primary education was a high priority, and the establishment of the national schools in 1831 was, in part at least, a response to this pent-up demand - although it also reflected what seems to have been an exaggerated concern at the unsuitable reading materials that many thought were being used by these schools: romances, and stories about highwaymen, instead of "improving" literature.
In our own time, we have seen the extraordinarily positive response of Irish parents to the availability of free secondary and then free university education. Almost 60 per cent of all of our school-leavers go on to higher education - a much higher proportion than the 43 per cent in England.
* Donald Akenson, The Irish Educational Experiment, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1970, page 121