Yesterday week Lord Emly made an important speech in the
House of Lords on the extreme deficiency in Ireland of trained teachers for the National Schools, and the natural result of that deficiency.' In England and Wales ( with a population of 22,700,000); there are 39 training schools, with 2,894 students,
and a grant of 195,000 ; in Scotland (with a population of 3,300,000), there were 5 training schools, with 704 students, and a grant of £20,500;' in Ireland (with, a population of 5,500,000), there wainbut one trainingeohoolovith 206 students, and a grant of. 27,646. In other words,rthe trained teachers are not a tenth of the number of the trained' teachers of England, though the population is a quarter of ours ; and they are not nearly a third of the number of trained teachers in Scotland, though the popu- lation is two-thirds as large again. In fact, of 9,802 national teachers, only 3,518 are trained as teachers at all. Of course, the result is, that with a very quick and lively infant popula- tion, the children learn little or nothing, compared with English and Scotch children of the same class. The difficulty is one which has been ably discussed by Mr. J. J. Murphy, in another column. We agree with Mr. Murphy that Lord Emly's wise suggestion, that the difficulty with the Catholic Bishops might be got over by training their teachers in the normal school, while providing for them Boarding-houses in 'which their moral and religious education could be superintended by persons of their own religion, is sufficient to meet the difficulty ; blit met, somehow or other, it must be. It is childish to keep the Irish ignorant, while we are quarrelling with their religious teachers as to the conditions on which they shall be permitted to get rid of their ignorance. If we could but get rid of their ignorance first, we might find that there was nothing left to quarrel about.
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