UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN IRELAND.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR." J SIR,—There can be no objection on the part of Catholics to including the Queen's College, Belfast, in any measure of University reform which may be undertaken. Provided we get fair play we are altogether in favour of raising the status and increasing the efficiency of existing University institu- tions, and as regards Belfast Queen's College we do not deny that it has fairly won its spurs. I daresay that this admis- sion will fully satisfy your correspondent, " Ulster Scot" (Spectator, December 3rd), and that he will regard as an un- important matter of detail my preference for two distinct Commissions rather than a mixed one composed of Catholics and Protestants. I do not like this latter idea, which would probably work out in " log-rolling" and compromise, and dis- content on the part of Catholics and Protestants. The precedent of the Oxford and Cambridge Act of 1877 seems to me a good one to follow. There Parliament laid down the broad principles that should govern the framing of the statutes of both Universities, but seeing that in so many respects the Universities differed from one another in character and needs, enacted Sec. 3 : " There shall be two bodies of Commissioners, styled respectively the University of Oxford Commissioners and the University of Cambridge Commissioners." So let us, under a common Act of Parliament, have two similar bodies, one composed of the best and most capable Catholics, another of those who are most capable of representing the interests which the University of Belfast would be founded to promote. These, as a matter of course, would be largely, if not exclu- sively, the different Protestant bodies of Ulster. Then we should have three teaching Universities in Ireland, two Pro- testant and one Catholic. And the infinitesimal residuum of secularists, finding the doors of all three Universities standing, by law, wide open for all comers, could maintain their own principles, and mix their education as they chose with that of any one or more of the religious bodies of the country.—I am,
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