LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
IRISH NATIONAL EDUCATION.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIRS I venture to think that the animal before which Mr. Murphy says I wish to put the Irish Education cart is not so much a horse, as a horned beast that could "push behind," and that to some purpose. If we have not decently good national schools, it is chiefly because the national schoolmaster is not decently well paid. This view Mr. Murphy has expressed in your columns, proposing as one remedy the raising of the school sees. This, however, without the guarantee of compulsion, might well mean the thinning of the attendance ; accompanied by compulsion, by which the number of pupils would be increased at the same time as the amount of their school-pence, it would raise the schoolmaster's income sufficiently to attract better men to that career. With the existing dearth of good teachers, it might, perhaps, be well for the compulsion law not to come into force immediately, but I believe nothing would do more towards .a good provision of teachers for the future than the immediate enactment of such a law.
Under present conditions, I have found great difficulty in keeping a school open and provided with a tolerable master, in a district where it is much wanted, and where there are plenty of children who should attend, owing to many of these children being kept away by their own whims and those of their parents. The priest has never opposed the school, though the teachers have been Protestants ; and I believe that many, if not most, of the country parish priests, though forbidden by the authorities of -their Church actively to encourage mixed schools, have the temporal as well as spiritual welfare of their flocks too much at heart actively to hinder the children being sent where they are best taught. In places where they attempt active opposition, the children of Roman Catholics are often sent to school in spite of them, and if the people had the law and the policeman for an excuse, this would, I think, be done still more largely.
As far as I understand the nature and working of the Conscience Clause, it would, if properly enforced, prevent compulsion bearing hardly upon any parent's conscience ; and if the bulk of the children once became regular attendants in the Board schools, the clergy of all denominations would find it to be for their interest and convenience to provide for the separate religious instruction of their respective lambs, under the conditions laid down by the Board rules, which might be amplified if necessary, whereas now they, to a great extent, neglect so to provide, under pretence of discountenancing a Godless system of education !
If the struggle between the State and the Roman Catholic Bishops is inevitable, as Mr. Murphy says, should not the State make its advance along the whole line, and enact compulsion, at least prospectively, at the same time that it carries out Mr. Murphy's suggestions for providing that the teachers should be properly trained? Both measures would be equally distasteful to the Roman Catholic. Bishops, and are, I think, equally necessary to the welfare of the people.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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