CIVIL SERVICES AND REVENUE DEPARTMENTS ESTIMATES, 1907

§ MR. KETTLE (Tyrone, E.)

said he rose to move the reduction of the Vote by £100. He certainly did not do so from any feeling of hostility towards those 889 somewhat unhappy institutions, the Queen's College in Ireland. As for moving a reduction of the amount of money to be spent either in this country or in Ireland upon education, such a thing would be farthest from the thoughts of any reasonable man. Anyone who was acquainted with the criticisms of Sir Norman Lockyer on the education system of Great Britain would appreciate what he was saying. When one remembered the amount of money spent on extensive forms of national immorality and compared it with the endowments of science, one appreciated the strength of his contention. As for Ireland— that paradise of the policeman — there the total Government endowments towards University education, including everything, was less by £15,000 than the amount spent on policing the city of Dublin, His Motion, however, was not made for that purpose, but for the purpose of drawing attention to the profoundly unstable and unsatisfactory condition of higher education in Ireland, and to draw special attention to the extremely anomalous position of the Government in regard to the suggested schemes for reforming the system. In discussing the Vote he understood it was customary and allowable to discuss the condition of University education in Ireland as a whole. It was only when they considered the system and fabrics as a whole that they could arrive at any conclusion of any value whatever. Their work of discussion was made easier and more necessary because the whole field of higher education in Ireland had come under the survey of two Commissions, one of which sat in 1901— 03 and the other more recently. Those Commissions had collected every fact bearing on higher education in Ireland, and he thought they had also collected many irrelevant facts. But taking them altogether they constituted a complete encyclopaædia of the problem of higher education in Ireland and gave hon. Members everything they needed to know in order to deal with the question. Someone had said there were certain questions in regard to which it was necessary in order to place them in their proper perspective and order, to recapitulate from the beginning. If anyone looked at the volumes of Hansard when the subject of Irish education had come under review they would see that that method had 890 been pretty well adopted. Ho did not, however, intend precisely to follow that method, but there were one or two facts which ought to be stated about Queen's Colleges. Let them take the name by which the colleges were known in history, viz., "godless colleges." Ho found that that term was prevalent amongst people friendly to education in Ireland; that it was a successful phrase, used by a bishop, inasmuch as it killed the colleges. But it was not by an Irish bishop that the term "godless" was applied but by a Tory Member for the University of Oxford, Sir Robert Inglis. It was a curious anomaly that at that moment the only institutions for higher education in Ireland in which there were religious tests, wore the so-called "godless" colleges. They had none, at least on paper, in Trinity College, and in the college which they allowed to be managed by Jesuits, viz., St. Stephen's Green, Dublin, there were no religious tests of any kind. Looking a little more closely into the matter they found that the first President of Queen's College, Galway, was a Catholic priest. It was only when the Government of that day had obstinately refused to make any concession of the most reasonable character that the new state of affairs began.

CIVIL SERVICES AND REVENUE DEPARTMENTS ESTIMATES, 1907–8.