EDUCATION IN IRELAND.
[To THE EDITOR 07 THE " SPECTATOR.") seems to me that there is no use whatever in the Defence of the Realm Act in Ireland. What good can result from suppressing a few seditious papers or from inflicting the fine of a few shillings on a mob-orator for preaching treason, while boys are taught history in the schools in such fashion as inculcates animosity and hatred against England, and, incidentally, against their fellow-citizens There is, of course, a Board of National Education, but it is a " Coalition " Board, and it is hampered by the fact that the cleavage between the loyal and the disloyal corresponds almost entirely to the cleavage between the Protestant and the Roman Catholic religious bodies. Tolerance is a principle with one body, intolerance with tho other. There are rather more than a million Protestants in Ireland. They are almost to a man loyalists. There are about three million and a half Roman Catholics, some bitterly disloyal, and almost all, with the exception of the classes who do not attend National schools, resentful and dissatisfied with English rule. History has been made first a religious subject—and then a political engine. Any man may write any sort of an Irish history for the general public, but no man should be allowed to put into the hands of impressionable boys and girls a wholly one-sided and partisan history. I have read four or five of these histories for the young ; they are most of them written on the same principle. Boys in school must necessarily accept as absolute truth that which their teacher requires them to read and learn. It is possible to write facts truly, and by the omission of facts equally true to create absolutely false impressions. Boys are told that under the system of Tanistry and the Brehon Laws the lands belonged to the tribe, and not to the chief, without noting that the annals are filled with accounts of the murders and fighting which constantly followed that system of election. Why tell that the " English forces " in their Irish wars destroyed and burned houses and crops, and never mention that every Irish chief did exactly the same thing (continually and of course) when ho raided his neighbours, and why not tell that the " English forces," in whole or in part, were Irishmen in English pay ? Why teach that " Catholic worship was forbidden " in Queen Elizabeth's reign ? J. R. Green says the chiefs had their private chaplains and the people went to Mass without molestation. Standish O'Grady says that, if it had been otherwise, Queen Elizabeth could not have held Ireland for a day. The writer of the school history before me quotes the great Catholic Bishop, Dr. Doyle, and his denunciation of the tithe system, but, dealing with the Penal Laws, he does not quote that prelate's view of them. When giving evidence before a Committee of the House of Commons he said : " I think they were justifiable ; nay, more, I think it was their duty to pass restrictive laws against the Catholics, considering the political opinions of the Catholics of that period." Is it not a naked fact that they were a normal product of the times ? They were but a pale reflection of the Penal Laws of France. Of the history of tithes the book gives no account. They were paid at the time of the Synod of Cashel in 1172, and for six hundred years after as a charge on land. They were a charge not invented by England. Neither the fathers nor grandfathers of schoolboys of to-day ever paid them. They are brought into the book for the sole purpose of introducing stories of how the farmers fought the soldiers and police. The obvious moral of such teaching is that bloodshed is the method to enforce your views. Of course these riots took place after Catholic Emancipation. That is mentioned, and dismissed with the words : " Granted by the English Parliament, not as a concession to the claims of justice, but as a surrender to fear." What can be expected from such teaching but senseless outbreaks like the Sinn Fein Rebellion of 1916 ?—I am, Sir, &c., R. KYLE KNox. .1 College Gardens, Belfast.
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