FROM THE ARCHIVES:New rules introducing compulsory Irish into secondary schools by the first Free State government were vigorously opposed by The Irish Times in 1924 which set out its reasoning in this editorial. – JOE JOYCE
YESTERDAY THE Church of Ireland Bishop of Cashel stated the case of that large minority of Irishmen which objects to the forcible imposition of the Irish language on secondary schools. In this objection there is not the remotest taint of political or sectarian prejudice. Everybody recognises that the Irish language has historical, sentimental and literary claims upon the people’s good-will. The present complaint is that in the Minister of Education’s new rules, sentiment is being pushed to the extremity of injustice. The Ministrys attempt to show that the rules are fair and reasonable to all classes has been exposed by the Headmaster of the Dublin High School and by the Warden of St Columba’s College as a piece of very irrelevant, if ingenious, special pleading. After the year 1928 no student will be able to obtain the Intermediate certificate without an examination in Irish. Schools which refuse to teach Irish in accordance with the rules will be penalised by the loss of public grants. There is an important class of schools which will be able to claim these grants only at a heavy cost to their pupils’ prospects in life. They are the schools, largely Protestant, which educate boys for professions and services that either are over-stocked to-day, or do not exist at all, in the Free State. The best pupils of these schools are compelled to seek careers outside Ireland, and, if they are to succeed, they must have received a certain type of education. That type of education is strangled by the new rules. Compulsory Irish will demand so much of the pupils’ time and study that in his later school years he will be handicapped hopelessly in his pursuit of Greek and Latin, French and German. The Ministry may declare that the best Irish boys ought not to be educated for export – but in the conditions which exist and are likely to continue, such pious exhortations are not merely futile, but irritating.
In effect, the Protestant schools must decide now whether they will penalise their students’ prospects or will sacrifice the grants from public taxation. Most of them, as we think, will accept the latter alternative; and, in that event, as Canon Leslie said yesterday at Waterford, the Protestant community will try to support these schools out of its own resources. If that necessity is created, the Free State Government will have been guilty of a flagrant injustice. The Southern minority – or former political minority – some half million in strength, is, beyond question, the most stable and is, perhaps, the most law-abiding, most industrious and most progressive element in the State. Its loyalty to the present Government is unconditional and sincere. Morally, legislation which inflicts special penalties on this class, interfering with their liberty of thought and action and wounding them through their children, is utterly indefensible. Economically, it is a blunder; for compulsory Irish cannot fail to depreciate the State’s most precious asset of character and brains. It will compel many parents to send their children to Great Britain and to Northern Ireland, where they can get the education that is a passport to the opportunities of the world. Politically, the new rules are unjust and their effect must be disastrous. They violate the Act of Settlement, since, whatever the Ministry may plead, they infringe the liberty of the subject, and put the English language in an inferior position, though the Constitution confers on it a precise equality with Irish. Furthermore, as Canon Leslie warns the Government, compulsory Irish plants a new barrier between the Free State and Northern Ireland at the very moment when all good Irishmen are praying that the miracle of Jericho’s walls may be repeated. We beg the Government to withdraw a scheme that is so pregnant with misfortune. It will service all national interests most truly by leaving the welfare of the Irish language to the unfettered patriotism of the schools.
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