PRIMARY EDUCATION (BELFAST) BILL. (Hansard, 9 May 1919)

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a second time. This Bill is one which requires no words of mine to commend it to the sympathy and approval of every Member of the House. Education in Ireland, particularly primary education, is perhaps one of the most pressing needs of the moment, and if it was urgent before the War, it is immensely more so now, when for a period of four and a half years building operations have been practically suspended. No such difficulty seems to confront the education authorities in Scotland or in England. In Scotland, they have perhaps the most perfect system of education that it would be possible for the wit of man to devise—a system of education that reflects the greatest possible honour on the genius and the enterprise of that sturdy and progressive race. In England, since 1870, there has been on the Statute Book an Act to enable the education authorities of this country to raise, for the purpose of primary schools, other than by voluntary contributions, funds for educational purposes, with the result that at the moment they have an admirable system of primary education which appears to have reached its climax in the admirable Bill that was passed through the House last year. Irish primary education is in a most lamentable condition. It has been most disgracefully neglected, and is at the moment a by-word and a reproach to all concerned. The voluntary system is all that we have to depend upon in Ireland for the purpose of building and equipping schools, and this has never been a very popular method in our country. There is in Belfast a large and growing population of, perhaps, 414,000, which is being added to by yearly increments of between 5,000 and 6,000. Of this great population, about 18 per cent., or what would be equivalent to 74,000, are school children who are directly concerned in the passing of this measure. To meet the needs of these 74,000 children, there are at the moment about 287 schools, which have been roughly divided into seven which are called good, 100 much inferior, 1226 eighty-seven bad, and eighty-one very bad—that is to say, in the latter case, schools that are absolutely insanitary, and only fit to be demolished. Assuming that these eighty-one insanitary schools had to be closed, we would then be confronted with the extraordinary position of about 28,000 school children without accommodation, and it is to meet this grave condition of affairs that this present Bill has been introduced.
The question with which we are confronted in discussing this Bill is, in the first instance, is the Bill really necessary, and, in the second place, what is the mode of procedure by which to put it into operation? With reference to the first question—the need for the Bill—it may be necessary for me to trouble the House with a few carefully selected figures explanatory of the condition of affairs with respect to primary education in Belfast. We have in Belfast a large and growing population at the moment of about 414,000, the yearly increase of which, on a more detailed investigation, might prove to be considerably more than the 5,000 or 6,000 I have mentioned. Now, as there are 18 per cent. of the population between the ages of five and fourteen, this would give 77,076 children of school age, but if we take it according to the National Board's statistics—that is, between six and fourteen—we find there are 16.4 of the population of school age, which would be equal to about 67,900 children. If we take the number of infants and those otherwise unlit from this number—about 4,860—it leaves the number of children to be provided for about 63,000. But, as there are bound to be 1,000 children over fourteen still attending our schools, and 10,000 under six years of age attending from day to day, it will be apparent there are at the moment 74,000 school children to be provided for. Taking the accommodation of the schools, and dividing it by ten, which is the proper number of square feet per child, the number of schools taken together only provide accommodation for 57,000, leaving 17,323 to be provided for—that is to say, there are between 15,000 and 17,000 children for whom the city cannot provide accommodation at the moment.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
Where did you get those figures?

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
I will give the information to my hon. Friend later, if he wishes it. If we are to deal with the question of continuation schools as provided for in the 1227 Bill we would have to provide for a further sum amounting to over £7,000, which is the total, according to the Bill. It has been stated that there are exceptional districts in the city—

§ Mr. SPEAKER
Is the hon. Member quoting, or is he reading his speech, because I would remind him that the reading of a speech is not allowed?

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
I am quoting statistics for the moment, Sir.

§ Mr. SPEAKER
I beg the hon. Member's pardon.

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
It has been suggested that there are exceptional districts in the city where this lack does not obtain. All I can say is that there is a deficit because of overcrowding, and the same tax is upon our resources, no matter as to what district you may consider the question. At the moment the theory is equally true when considered in the denominational sense. Turning to the Bill itself, it cannot be objected, I think, that the Belfast Corporation is not the proper authority to administer this Bill. I think even hon. Friends across the floor will admit that under the circumstances the Belfast Corporation is the proper authority for administering the Bill.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Not at all.

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
That is my position anyhow with all respects to hon. Members. Moreover, I am encouraged in taking that attitude by the attitude which has been adopted by the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney-General, who, evidently, in anticipation of the matter, has provided through proportional representation the means by which there can be a greater and a fuller representation upon this important committee.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
Proportional representation, to which you were apposed.

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
I had nothing to do with that. All I have got to say is that there is no departure from principle in this matter, because, hitherto, the right has been acknowledged in the city even by those opposed to the Bill. Is it not the fact, for instance, that, at the moment, Catholics and Protestants alike are contributing to what is called the technical education rate—that is a means by which Protestants as well as Catholics are 1228 enabled to learn trades and various arts in technology? Is it not the fact, also, that they contribute, through the rates, to the maintenance of public libraries in which they can get works which in man; instances are banned by the representatives of the Catholic Church. In this instance they find no objection to contributing to the rates. The education authority in this case is the Belfast Corporation. It is within its power, then, to nominate a committee that shall be called the executive committee in connection with the administration of the Act. This committee, it is suggested, should consist of fifteen members who would represent the fifteen wards of the city, and ten more, or two-thirds of the number, who should represent certain other interests. In that case we would have what may be called a very representative committee. Everyone in that case would have to be consulted, and there would be no reason in the world why there should be any objection to the scheme.
The Belfast Corporation, then, are constituted the authority. They have the power to levy a rate. They have for the moment taken means by which they can provide for the representation of all concerned I think there is nothing in connection with the Bill which can possibly be suggested as in any sense unfair. The parents of the children in the one case would have a representative, or might have several representatives. The teachers in such schools would also be represented. The existing managers would be represented, and others who, in the opinion of the education authority, would be useful to the Committee. This represents the scope of the Bill, as it were, with the exception, perhaps, of a few particulars that could be discussed in the course of the Committee stage, and which need not be referred to at the moment. There are some general remarks I should like to make with regard to the general scope of the Bill. There is the claim of the industrial classes which we must recognise in connection with this Bill. It is essentially a worker's Bill. No person can deny that. Higher schools and seminaries are provided for the middle and the upper classes. It is only the National schools that the working-classes have to depend upon for the education of their children I am afraid that in many instances there the children are herded together, the suggestion behind that being 1229 that it is desirable that they should be kept off the streets. If we have control of the baths, libraries, and museums, why should we not have control of the primary schools? There can be no possible objection to that seeing that we are considering a class of people that are at the moment most deserving of our consideration.
To persist in compulsory education without providing the necessary accommodation for the children, would, to my mind, be a paradox. How can you possibly compel children to attend school if you have not made provision for them? Where you require the children to attend school, a school should be there in order that the full number of children eligible should be present. For my own part I would be most indisposed to allow a child of mine to attend a school which was in any sense overcrowded, or it might be suggested was a danger to its health. There are schools, as I know, that are in such a condition. We have schools in Belfast that are really converted private houses. One or two I could point out where two houses have been converted into one in order to constitute a schoolhouse. There is not one, but several instances of that sort. Another thing in connection with this that is greatly to be regretted is that in many instances sanitary matters are too often neglected. I know schools where there has neither been paint nor whitewash nor window-cleaning for several years. I could take hon. Members to a school where it would be difficult to say whether it was in occupation as a school or not, so absolutely derelict is the building in appearance. If we are going in for the medical inspection of school children, I cannot, for the life of me, see how we can fail to make, at the same time, the necessary provision in respect of sanitary accommodation. Their health is threatened in the schools in which they are crowded now. If we are going to insist on medical inspection, as provided for in the Bill, and, indeed, as has been already legislated upon by the House, I fail to see how we can, in justice, refuse to make the necessary reforms in regard to the sanitary requirements of the schools.
We come to an important matter—that is, the voluntary school system. I regret to say that I have always been, as it were, an Ishmaelite in this matter. I cannot help it. I have always been opposed to anything in the nature of a voluntary school, for this reason, amongst others, 1230 that it necessarily tends to be affected by the Church organisation. If there are funds forthcoming in the Church, they are always needed for the special use of the Church, and are always denied for the necessary renovation of the schools. We find, moreover, that the schools cannot be properly cleansed, for, as a rule, the sexton is responsible not only for the care of the church, but for the care of the schools. His salary, in many instances, is so inadequate as not to encourage him to look after the necessary cleansing of the schools. I could take hon. Members to certain schools in the city where it would not require many minutes to determine how long it was since the floors were last washed, or the walls last whitewashed. This is the condition of some of our schools in the city. Not only are they overcrowded, but they are absolutely insanitary, and an absolute menace to the children. Continuation schools is a matter to which we must pay special attention. I have come across a good many children who have left school, and it has been my regrettable experience to notice that after they have become apprentices the little education they have got at school has lapsed in the interval. This is much to be deplored. It is much the same thing when they are taken from school and do not attend evening continuation classes, as we see in the case of boys who are apprenticed to a business and are taken away before their time has expired. The population of Belfast have not the means to provide privately the necessary primary education, and the little they do get should have some kind of continuity by the provision of such schools as those which are suggested in this Bill.
With regard to the question of training colleges I do not think there can, perforce, be any objection to their establishment in Belfast. At the moment it is necessary that Belfast teachers should go to Dublin to be trained. Why should that be, because we employ more teachers in Belfast than they do in Dublin? We have in Belfast a university where our students are trained, and why should we have to send the teachers we require for the training of our children to Dublin in order to be trained? This seems to me to be a hopeless and an extensive waste of money, because we can immediately provide an institution for ourselves in the city, and this would be in the interests of the teachers. I do not think 1231 that really there can be any opposition to the passage of this Bill in regard to any of the Glauses which it contains.
There are some things which would probably give rise to discussion in Committee, but they can be amicably settled there. I do not think hon. Members opposite have any right to complain with regard to our attitude. They have to realise in the first instance that it is a very difficult matter for us to provide schools by voluntary effort, and therefore some other means must be adopted. In the six years ending on the 31st of the third month of 1912 there were expended upon building schools in Ireland £247,618, of which the Catholic population got £214,479 and the Protestant population £33,139. During the very same period there were given £49,393 absolutely as a present and totally,it the public expense for the fresh building of schools. We know that during the very same period there were expended for the purpose of convent schools £27,982 and monastery schools £3,933. Therefore I suggest that at least they have nothing to complain of with regard to Government Grants.
It can be fully demonstrated that we have applied again and again for these Government Grants, and we have been refused on the ground that there is no more money to be allocated. Consequently, there certainly should be no reasonable excuse for refusing us the power to assess ourselves in order to maintain our own schools. At the moment there are seventeen schools vested in the Board and sixty-four vested in trustees, and the other schools are unprovided. That is the condition of affairs we are called upon in the interest of the citizens to consider. I do not know what the effect of my appeal to the House may be. I cannot say, for instance, what the attitude of the Government is likely to be with regard to this appeal which we are making on behalf of education in Belfast. One thing I am sure, is that never perhaps in the history of the House has such a case been made out in favour of immediate legislation upon this very important question.

§ Mr. LYNN
I beg to second the Motion.
It seems to me strange that we should have to discuss this Bill, because it strikes me as a most reasonable measure, which should be passed without any opposition. I think I am safe in saying that the 1232 opposition to this Bill comes from the Roman Catholics. They have an old-fashioned idea, which in my judgment is absurd, that public money should be for education without any public control. I contend that in this democratic age that is an indefensible proposition and one that cannot be maintained. They not only object to Protestants having control of education, but they also object to training the laity. They do not mind a comic opera republic, but the Protestant laity must not be allowed to look after their own schools. That is a position we object to, and we do so because we believe clericalism is strangling education in Ireland, and we want to lake that strangle off as quickly as we can.
I have no doubt that during this discussion we shall be told that this is an attempt on the part of Ulster Unionists to establish godless education, but nothing is further from our minds. We hold as strong religious views as hon. Gentlemen opposite, and we are just as anxious as they can be that education should be established on the only basis upon which true education can rest, namely, the basis of religion, because education without religion is an engine without steam. I think the time has come when we should get rid of the idea that the schools must be the close preserve of the Church—I do not care which Church. I wish to put the question, is education in Ireland in the future to be the exclusive prerogative of the Church? I put that question especially for the benefit of my hon. Friends on the Labour and Liberal Benches, and I am sorry there are not more present because they talked very loudly in their own country with regard to the freedom of education and taking it from under the control of clericalism, and I should have thought that they would have been here even in their attentuated battalion to support us in this attempt to establish public control over our schools. I am sorry they are not here in larger numbers, and I hope those who are here will support us in this attempt to get popular control over our schools.
I am not going to travel over the ground which has been so ably gone over by my hon. Friend who preceded me. At the present moment Members from England and Scotland should understand that the Irish schools are under the control of managers who have absolute power with regard to the appointment and dismissal of teachers, but I want this fact to be driven home to 1233 my hon. Friends across the floor of the House. Education in Ireland is administered by the clerical management without this House or the parents of the children or anybody else having any control over them. The managers are autocrats. Is that a state of affairs that hon. Members opposite want to continue? I only ask the House, because I think the question answers itself. I am not going to say a hard word with regard to the managers, whether Roman Catholics or Protestants. Many of them have done excellent work, and have kept the flag of education flying when probably otherwise it would have gone down; but the time has come when the State ought to take control of education in Ireland, as it has taken control of it in England and Scotland.
Since I came to this House, I have listened to many eloquent speeches with regard to Bolshevism and the spread of Bolshevism. Could anything be more calculated to disseminate or spread Bolshevism than the lack of education? My hon. Friend gave us some figures with regard to the number of children in the great and growing city of Belfast who cannot find school accommodation. What hope is there for a generation rising without any education? Is not this the breeding ground for Bolshevism and for all the other evils that we so much fear? I think that 90 per cent. of the social evils from which this country and Ireland suffer would begot rid of if we could only educate the people properly. Personally, I am a strong believer in education, because it is only by education that you can disseminate true knowledge and get rid of that ignorance which leads to so much trouble. Therefore, I confidently appeal to the Members of this House to support this Bill. It is not necessary for me to deal with the character of the schools in Belfast. My hon. Friend has dealt with that very fully. Let me say, however, speaking from long personal knowledge of those schools, that they are a disgrace to any city. The National Board has condemned them again and again. Their Reports are full of indignation. Personally, I have written hundreds of times condemning the conditions existing in our national schools; but what could we do? We could not get Grants from the Government and we had not the legal power to tax ourselves. We say that this position is intolerable and that this House should relieve us from it and do so at once. No doubt I shall be told by someone, 1234 "Wait, and you will get Grants from the Treasury." I am not very optimistic with regard to getting Grants from the Treasury. We have a saying in Belfast, "When you want to get anything done, do it yourself." That is exactly what we want to do now. We do not want to wait until the Treasury gets generous, if it ever does. Besides, there will be so many claims upon the Treasury in the future that we see very little prospect of them lending a sympathetic car to the claims of Belfast, no matter how eloquently those claims may be put forward. We want to raise the money ourselves, and I ask, Are we to be denied that privilege because a few reactionaries who breathe the spirit of the Middle Ages say "No"?
Another point which my hon. Friend made, and one in which I am deeply interested, is that of the age of which children have to leave school. They have to leave school at too early an age in Belfast, and we want to put an end to that. It is hardly necessary to remind the House that Belfast produced one of the greatest scientists of the past century, Lord Kelvin. For all that we know, there may be hundreds oil potential Lord Kelvins going about the city of Belfast unable to find school accommodation. Is it not a disgrace that those bright young lads should be denied the opportunity of developing their brains, and probably becoming a great help and a great source of pride, not only to the city of Belfast, but also to the Empire? Therefore, on broad Imperial as well as local grounds, I ask the House to support the Second Heading of this Bill. I have not the slightest doubt that before this discussion is over we shall be told a great many things with regard to bigotry of Belfast. I do not know what effect these stories have upon English and Scottish Members, but I have listened to them for years, and, as I know that they are largely fiction, they amuse me more than anything else. I do not know that we have a double dose of original sin in Belfast, or that we are any more bigoted than the people of any other city, but, if our hon. Friends opposite say that we are bigoted, let us compare our bigotry in this Bill with the bigotry of the enlightened community in Scotland. The Scottish people passed an Education Bill last Session, and I notice that that Bill says that if there is any trouble with regard to schools coming under the provision of the Bill it is to be settled by an 1235 arbitrator, and, in the case of voluntary schools which decide to remain outside, they are to get no assistance whatever either from the Government Grant or local aid. Bigoted Belfast has done a great deal better, because, if Members will take the trouble to read Clause. 10 of this Bill, they will see that we have offered the most generous terms to our friends the enemy who refuse to come in.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Who are your friends the enemy?

§ Mr. LYNN
The hon. Member asks me who they are. As he is the commander in chief of them, and, if I may say so, a very able and capable chief, it is hardly necessary for me to describe who they are. In Clause 10 we have made the most generous provision for the voluntary schools which refuse to come within the ambit of this Bill, and I do not see that our friends have any reason to complain. They have an appeal to the National Board. We have only one object in bringing forward this Bill, and that is to promote the cause of education in Belfast. During the War the loyal people of Belfast poured out their blood in streams, and were proud to do it, in order that this Empire might be defended against its enemies. To-day there is scarcely a house in the city where someone is not mourning, and yet I have not heard a complaint. Are we to go back to these people and tell them that because of the hostility of a Roman Catholic bishop, who is the patron of an association which expels members who take the oath of allegiance to the King, we cannot be allowed to provide suitable schools for our children?

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I rise, as one of the reactionaries of the Middle Ages, for the purpose of moving the rejection of this Bill. I should like to point out that it is a strange circumstance that the rather pathetic picture, or, as I should say, the rather sordid story, which has been recited by both the hon. Gentleman who moved and the hon. Gentleman who seconded the Bill, could have been painted with equal power and impressiveness at any period of our Parliamentary history for the last ten years. I cannot understand what is the meaning of this newly-found enthusiasm for education on those benches. To make a vast change of this character in our educational system may be desirable or it may not be desirable, but, at all events, I do 1236 not think that it is a very courageous thing to select a moment when Ireland is practically denuded of its representation in this House for the purpose, not of robbing the unrepresented people in Ireland of their educational rights, advantages, and privileges, but of imposing a tyranny upon the minority of Catholics in Belfast, whom I have the honour to represent. What is the House of Commons to think of a great community like Belfast that sends its representatives to tell the story that we have been told from those benches to-day? This city has held up the world in the world's desire to see the Irish problem settled, and yet they tell the story that in this great, powerful and rich community there are 18,000 children without school accommodation. The hon. Gentleman told the House how lavish the Treasury were in their grants for Catholic schools in Belfast as compared with the Protestant schools.

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
What I said related to Ireland and not to Belfast only.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Very well, I will take it at that, or any part of Ireland that you choose to select. The National Board only gives grants to schools when the persons building them raise a portion of the money themselves. The Catholics raise a third of the amount needed for building, and the National Board gives two-thirds. If you have not the courage, or the public spirit, or the generosity, or the recognition, which you claim now, for the work of education in the country, and you do not raise this money in this rich and cultured community and prosperous and powerful city yourselves by voluntary effort, then you have no right to come to the House of Commons and say that you have not got your fair share of whatever grants were going for the building of schools. I am not going to dissent from anything that has been said from those benches as to the necessity for good, healthy, clean, sanitary and cheerful schools and conditions. I recognise that the physical and mental culture of a people is the highest function of citizenship. I believe if Belfast had been better educated that it would not have been as Unionist as it is. No one has suffered more from its ignorance than I have, and therefore I am eminently anxious that every facility should be given to the hon. Gentlemen, and those they represent, to secure that mental development and 1237 that improvement which I think will secure a larger and a more tolerant viewpoint upon the world's affairs. The next function of the State and of all high-spirited and intelligent men is to secure a properly paid teaching staff for our schools. There is no one who recognises more than I do that a great deal of the discontent which exists in Ireland to-day has been due to the scandalous way in which the school teachers of Ireland have been treated. When I was in America—I hope you will not be angry with me for mentioning the name of America—one of the most impressive things I used to say—I hope I may be forgiven for being so egotistical as to quote my own speeches—was that a policeman was paid a larger wage for hitting the head of an Irishman than the teacher was paid for cultivating his intellect. That was perfectly true. A dock labourer was better paid and, I think, is paid better even now than a school teacher.

§ Mr. TILLETT
He has fought for it.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Certainly he has. I will say something about that in a minute. The dock labourers have got their increased wage because they fought for it. My hon. Friend (Mr. Tillett) is a Labour leader; he is not a common Irish agitator. A Labour leader has an instrument at his hand by which he can secure reforms for the toiling masses whom he represents, but a teacher is denied civic rights, is paid 25s. a week, is compelled to dress well, has to live in a decent cottage, has to go to his school with a clear mind, and is offered 25s. a week for the discharge of that highest and most impressive national function of training the youthful lives of the country for the discharge of their future citizenship. I agree that the teachers ought to be paid well. Anything that can improve the character of the schools, secure a larger number of them and make them a healthy and sound arena for the development of the youthful mind of the country, has my absolute and entire support. But is this the way to secure it? The right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Duncairn Division of Belfast (Sir E. Carson) is a very powerful man.

§ Sir E. CARSON
Oh, no!

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Yes, you are!

§ Sir E. CARSON
I wish I were!

§ Mr. DEVLIN
The right hon. Gentleman can make Chancellors. He can break 1238 up Acts of Parliament and can upset Ministries. I do not think I do him too much honour when I say that he is the most powerful politician in Great Britain to-day. I have rarely been on his side in this House, and I would like, for the novelty of it, to be so.

§ Sir E. CARSON
Join me, and then we will beat them all.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I will make a sporting offer to the right hon. Gentleman. He knows that the British Treasury is the common enemy of us both. I think he will admit that. I have heard him say that in this House several times. It has often been said that if Irish Members, unite they could get fair play from the British Treasury.

§ Sir E. CARSON
Quite true!

§ Mr. DEVLIN
The right hon. Gentleman is the most powerful politician in these Islands. I am one of the weakest politicians. [Hon. Members: "No, no!"]With a combination of his strength and my weakness, we can go to the Treasury and we can remind them of one or two things. We can say that in the city of Belfast, of which we are both Members, there is not sufficient school accommodation for the children of the people who have built up the power and greatness of that city, and that 18,000 children are left in the highways and the byways, the alleys and the lanes of Belfast, and there is no place for them to go to have their minds developed and their bodies trained in discipline. You give us the essential funds to equip our schools, to rebuild them where needed, to build additional schools, and to pay our teachers decent salaries. Then the right hon. Gentleman and I will have been engaged for the first time in a co-operative mission mutually advantageous to us both. Am I entitled to ask the Treasury to do this? In England and Wales last year the Grant for education was £19,206,705. This year the Grant for education in England and Wales is £31,000,000, or an increase of £12,000,000. In Scotland, which has a population equal to that of Ireland last year, the education Grant was £3,041,545. This year it is £4,677,320, an increase of £1,600.000. In Ireland last year the education Grant was £2,203,104. This year it is £2,721,356, an increase of £518,252. That is £1,000,000 less for Ireland, although, according to the hon. Gentleman who introduced this Bill, Scot- 1239 land is the most magnificently equipped country in the world so far as education is concerned, and Ireland is the worst. Yet the worst gets £518,000 and the best £1,600,000. [An HON. MEMBER: "Quite true!"] Are you a Home Ruler after that? [Hon. Members: "No!"] You ought to be. Will the serried forces of Unionism join behind their distinguished and powerful leader and join with us in going to the Treasury and asking why it is that, according to their own estimate, the best endowed country in the world educationally actually gets £1,500,000 more money than the worst?

§ Sir E. CARSON
I have already made a most emphatic protest on this matter to the Irish Government.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
That is not the thing for the right hon. Gentleman to do. He knows as well as I do that protests do not count on these benches. Let us have a rebellion. If my hon. Friend below me (Mr. Tillett) appealed to me, I would say let us have a strike. But we never can have a successful strike in Ireland. The only thing we can have is a rebellion. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman raises once again the standard of revolt against the robbery and confiscation which the British Treasury is pursuing towards Ireland, and the manner in which it is sucking the life-blood out of the nation financially—[Laughter]—it is so absolutely. I do not know what Minister is on the Front Bench. I hardly ever know a Minister when I see him. But whoever is the amused person sitting on the Ministerial Bench, I say it is robbery and confiscation to take the taxation you are taking out of Ireland every year when you have the sordid and squalid story which has been told from the benches opposite to-day as to the conditions under which education is being carried on in that country. I came here and made a protest. The right hon. Gentleman (Sir E. Carson) was not here, or he might have joined me against the imposition of an additional burden of £10,000,000 upon Ireland under this Budget.

§ Sir E. CARSON
That is on drink.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
It does not matter what it is on.

§ Sir E. CARSON
It does matter. I wish there were more on drink.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
It does not matter. If that is the morality of the right hon. Gen- 1240 tleman, why do you tax whisky at all? Why do not you abolish it? It was not all on whisky. At any rate, if you take £10,000,000 extra out of Ireland on drink or anything else we have a right to a share in that for all the things that Ireland needs which involve the expenditure of public money. I do not care whether it is £10,000,000 or £20,000,000, the tax is ours, not yours. Say it is £10,000,000 additional burden on whisky. It was not our Chancellor of the Exchequer but your Chancellor of the Exchequer who imposed it. It is our money, no matter what it is on. I come now to the introduction of this Bill. It is perfectly true that there is not sufficient accommodation in Belfast for the Protestant children of that great city. I regret it. There is ample accommodation for the Catholic children. [Hon. Members: "No, no!"] Yes, the Catholic population took the matter of building schools into their own hands, and by subscriptions they raised one-third of the building grant. Even the figures of the hon. Gentleman who introduced the Bill prove that. They satisfied the requirements of the National Board, and the National Board are satisfied now as to the accommodation for Catholic children. [Hon. Members: "No, no!"] It is not our fault that the Protestant population of Belfast were guilty of this appalling neglect of education by not securing the essential fund of one-third of the amount needed for the building of the schools, because the National Board would have given them the other two-thirds. Let the House mark that the Catholics of Belfast are the poorer section of the community. They are not amply endowed with this world's goods. They have not the great industrial concerns; they are not the master capitalists of the city; they are the poorest section of the community. Yet out of the wealth of their poverty, with their instinct and tradition for learning, with the desire of men and women who did not enjoy any education themselves, but who know the value of it for their children, they raised large sums of money year by year by tremendous sacrifices for the purpose of securing the essential part of the amount which was needed for the building of the splendidly-equipped schools of which the Catholics of Belfast can boast to-day. Why do not the Protestant members of the community do the same thing?

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
We are better off in school accommodation than the Catholics are by the proportion of seventeen to twenty-four.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
The figures are on record. But they did not do that. Instead of this we claim that they should go to the Treasury and ask the Treasury to give a Grant for the building of schools in Belfast, and I would go with them and press the Treasury to give them a Grant to build a Protestant school which will accommodate every Protestant child. They proceed to introduce a measure which is bound to arouse deep and bitter passions and religious controversies in Ireland on this education question, as the religious question in Ireland is cursed by your educational controversies in this country. When I came into the House in 1901, and for fully a dozen Sessions afterwards, I wondered was it only in Ireland that we had religious bitterness and religious feuds. The most violent and bitter feuds I have heard in any assembly were those that took place between the Nonconformists and the representatives of the Church of England in this House on the religious question in relation to the education proposals of the respective Governments. It was only when the English Minister for Education came along with his proposals and avoided these religious controversies that he was able to carry through great national schemes for the development of education in this country which have been universally accepted by all parties and religious faiths.
Let me come to the figures which the hon. Member has challenged. The average number of Catholic children on the rolls in 1917 was 15,630. The average daily attendance was 11,900. According to National Board Regulation 185 the average school accommodation required is the mean between the number on the rolls and the daily average. The accommodation required was for 13,765. The accommodation actually provided was 12,870, according to the report of the secretary of the school attendance committee. These figures do not take into account the accommodation for 506 children of the national schools, at Nazareth Lodge, so that the Catholic schools provide accommodation for 13,376 children, or only 389 less than the mean number for which accommodation is required by the National Board.

§ Mr. MOLES
For what year is the hon. Member quoting?

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I am quoting from, I think, 1917. In addition to these national schools, ample provision is made in such schools as the Christian Brothers, St. Malachi's College, St. Paul's Convent School, St. Dominic's High School, the Catholic schools at Milltown and the Crumlin School and the White Abbey, and also the various convent schools. I do not deny that considerable improvement is needed in the Catholic schools. [Interruption.] I am saying it here. In fact, over three years ago a building Grant was ordered, for which the local people secured their necessary quota, for the enlargement of one of the great schools, which was suspended on account of the War, and undoubtedly the Catholic community in Belfast would have raised every farthing, needed for the purpose of enlarging the present schools and improving them and building other schools, if it were not for the war conditions, which prevented anything like the building of schools. If you want schools, what you ought to do is to put your hands in your pockets in the way that the poorer section of the community in Belfast have done, and subscribe one-third of the Grant and the National Board will secure you the other two-thirds from the Treasury, and the Treasury can disgorge the stolen goods from Ireland and pay them back in restitution to the Protestants for building new schools for their children, and that, in my judgment, would be an honest transaction, which would' arouse none of those troubles and create none of the mischief which is bound to eventuate if you force this measure. If you carry this Bill, you will not get Catholic children to attend these schools.

An HON. MEMBER
They would attend their own.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
They have paid for their own and they attend their own. You want, us, the weak and poorest section of the community, to build our schools, to equip and maintain them, and then to contribute to a local rate to build schools for you. [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] Yes you do. [HON. MEMBERS: "Certainly not!"] Very well, say in your Bill that the rate will. only be struck upon Protestant ratepayers You are striking a rate which all must pay, and if I had such a high opinion of myself, if I were so full of civic self-conceit as the hon. Member opposite—

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
Is the hon. Member referring to me?

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I never was thinking of you for a moment—I would not come here to ask the British Parliament, that has rung with your glories and heard of your greatness, to give you power to put a local rate upon the poor, struggling, toiling Catholics, who have done all they could by sacrifices to build and equip their schools, in order to enable you, the powerful, the wealthy, and the commercially great, to be able to gather your 18,000 children in the lanes and alleys into the schools of our city.
But I come to the most serious part of the Bill. It sets up the Belfast Corporation as the education authority, and I was amazed at the hon. Member saying, "Surely hon. Members opposite could have no objection to that." The hon. Gentleman is a very genuinely sincere Member of the House, and, apart from politics, I have the greatest possible admiration for him, but really was he serious in that? Does he think we trust the Belfast Corporation? I think he paid us too much honour. I have fought against the Belfast Corporation outside, and I have had to promote their interests inside this House. In many respects they are a very efficient public body, but I would as soon trust a number of lambs before a jury of butchers as trust Catholic interests before the interests of the Belfast Corporation. If you are going to do it right, hand this over entirely to the Ulster Unionist Alliance.

§ Mr. MOLES
There is no such body.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Instead of the new town hall, hand it over to the old town hall. I would accept that as a clear, frank, and outspoken declaration of your policy. Our educational interests are very sacred to the Catholics of Belfast. The hon. Member paid a tribute to the value of religious education. I am quite sure that in that he was perfectly sincere, but no Protestant, however sincere, can be so intensely passionate in his desire for the preservation of religion in our schools as Catholics are, and to place themselves at the mercy of the Belfast Corporation, which knows as much about toleration as I do about the domestic affairs of Japan, is a thing we cannot and will not do. Line by line and Clause by Clause we will fight this Bill here and in Committee before we ever allow the interests of the Catholics 1244 of Belfast to be handed over to the tender mercies of that body. I want to know where this whole thing that we are now discussing emanated from. Did it emanate from the fathers of the children? Did it emanate from any school authorities? This thing was hatched in the Chamber of Commerce—an antiquated, reactionary, non-elective body. Nobody has any respect for them even on questions of commerce. Having concocted their plan in the old town hall, having transferred it to the chamber of commerce to give it a colourless appearance, they drafted a scheme and sent it to the town council at the new town hall; and then the council in the new town hall appointed a committee to deal with the problem. Will the House believe that there was a single Catholic on that committee?

§ Mr. MOLES
There was one from each Roman Catholic ward.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
How many members were there on that committee?

§ Mr. MOLES
Fifteen from each ward.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
That was not the committee to which I am referring, which was a large body composed of members not only of the town council but of other bodies. It was a committee of about fifty.

§ Mr. M'GUFFIN
That was subsequently.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Yes. On that body of fifty there was not a single Catholic. You are going to establish a new educational system for Belfast with 100,000 Catholics out of a population of 400,000, and you are going to so fashion your machinery and create a new system that not one of them will have a word to say in the adjustment of that problem. Then you come to an ignorant House of Commons—I do not care whether you judge it by its coupon or its conscience—you come and tell the story here and ask the House to give, not merely constitutional sanction to a great constitutional measure, but to absolutely stamp with its approval this thing concocted in the Unionist Alliance Office in Belfast.

§ Sir E. CARSON
There is no such party.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
This is an attempt also to destroy the managerial system. The hon. Member for Woodvale made an attack upon the bishops and the clergy. I do 1245 not know whether he is more popular with them than I am. All I have to say is that I have never had a communication of any sort of character, directly or indirectly, from any bishop or clergyman in Belfast on this question. If every bishop and priest and clerical manager in Belfast were in favour of this thing, I would be opposed to it. I would be opposed to it because, whatever you may say about the managerial system, I think on the whole it has worked well. [HON. MEMBERS: "No, no."] Yes, it has. It may not be, after all, the most democratic form of management, but surely you do not object to that. I understand the secret of your power is the negation of that principle of democracy.

§ Sir E. CARSON
That is where you are wrong.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Perhaps I am wrong sometimes, but I do not think I am wrong in that. It is proposed to pass over the management of the schools from managers, Protestant and Catholic, whose management has not been called in question at all. There have been no public meetings about this thing. There has been no demand in the newspapers, except perhaps the worked up newspapers of hon. Gentlemen opposite. There has been, so far as I know, no popular opinion in favour of this thing. If there has, we have not seen it. You are going to change the educational system of an important community without any public demand. But I am interested in right and freedom, and, apart from what managers of schools may say, I am opposed to the Belfast Corporation controlling the schools of Belfast. I will give the House an instance, not in countless other matters which I could cite, but in this precise matter of education, of the sort of thing that will happen if you give the Belfast Corporation the right to control and appoint teachers in that city. There is a sanatorium in White-abbey. The proportion of children in that school is 55 per cent. Protestant and 45 per cent. Catholic. One would imagine that in a case like that you would appoint one Protestant and one Catholic teacher. A vacancy occurred, and the Committee gave the appointment to a Protestant, and the two Catholic members of the governing body voted for giving it to a. Protestant. Six weeks after another vacancy occurred for a teacher, and a Catholic applied. The 1246 Catholic was rejected and another Protestant appointed. Forty-five per cent. of the children in that school were Catholic and 55 per cent. Protestant, and yet, with two vacancies occurring within a limited period of about twelve months, both appointments were given to Protestants. That was done on the eve of the introduction of this Bill. One would have thought that common tact and policy would have dictated that they would hold their hand rather than have a matter like this stated in the House of Commons when the proposal came before it. Their bigotry is so ingrained, they are so intolerant, that they actually forced an additional Protestant into a school for consumptive children. That is a measure of the liberty and right which Catholics are to get, not in the Whiteabbey Sanatorium, but in every school which this town council would control.
I come now to Clause 4, which enacts that the education authority shall be at liberty to continue the giving of instruction in religion to children. If the education authority are to have liberty to continue religious instruction, they will also have power to discontinue religious instuction. What is the point of stating in your Bill that you will have the power to continue religious instruction if you will not equally have the corresponding power of discontinuing it?

§ Mr. MOLES
That is quite wrong. If the hon. Member will look at the Bill, he will see that exactly the contrary is provided. There is continuance for the existing system. Let the hon. Member look at Clauses 4 and 5.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Yes, I have looked at them. That is more than you did. I did read them very carefully—very late last night.

§ Mr. MOLES
The hon. Member received a copy from me long before that.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
You handed me your copy at midday yesterday. I did not look at it till last night, when I had got my own copy. Does the hon. Member deny the words of the Bill?

§ Sir E. CARSON
What are the words?

§ Mr. DEVLIN
The education authority shall be at liberty to continue the giving of religious instruction to those children—

§ Sir E. CARSON
That is not Clause 4. Clause 4 runs as follows: Whereas it has been the custom in the public elementary schools in the county borough of Belfast to give instruction in religion to children whose parents did not object to the instruction so given, but with liberty to parents, without forfeiting any of the other advantages of the schools, to elect that their children should not receive such instruction. Be it enacted that the education authority shall be at liberty to continue the said custom, subject to the provisions of the rules and regulations issued by the Commissioners, and for this purpose it shall be the duty of the education I authority to afford facilities for the provision of religious instruction in all schools controlled by them, and the times stated pursuant to the rules and regulations of the Commissioners as the times during which religious instruction is given in the school shall, for all children who have reached the third standard… and so on.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I am not aware that anything that the right hon. Gentleman has quoted has contradicted anything I have stated.

§ Sir E. CARSON
You are not a lawyer.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
No, that is why I am in such a pathetic position to-day. In these matters I prefer to be a plain, blunt man. Was this drafted for lawyers to quarrel over when the Bill is passed? I am putting the interpretation of the ordinary man in the street with the limit of intelligence I possess. That is all. The statement in the Bill is that the education authority shall be at liberty to continue the giving of instruction in religion to children. If they have the liberty to do that, they have the liberty to withhold it, and from what I know of the Belfast Corporation I say that Catholic children and Catholic teachers, if there ever were Catholic teachers in these schools, would not have that opportunity given to them. In Clause 5, Section 3, it is stated that The instruction may be given by any association approved for the purpose by the education authority or the Commissioners, or may be given by any person approved by the parent or by any teacher employed in the school.…The permission of the education authority shall not be withheld under this provision as respects a teacher unless they are of opinion that the giving of religious instruction by such teacher will be detrimental to the education given in the school. Can the right hon. Gentleman explain that? I should be glad to have his legal interpretation of what it means. I think it means that the Belfast Corporation can refuse permission to give this religious instruction in schools. That is my reading of it. To leave a matter of that sort to 1248 a body of the character of the Belfast Corporation would be one of the most indefensible things for which any Member of this House on this side could be responsible.

§ Sir E. CARSON
The hon. Member appeals to me. If he reads on he will see that there is power if they refuse to appeal to the Education Commissioners.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I know they can appeal to the Education Commissioners, but I have no faith in the Education Commissioners. Clause 8, Section 3, authorises the education authority to purchase land compulsorily, but no order shall be made for the compulsory acquisition of any school existing at the passing of the Act. This means that any Catholic school started in the future may be compulsorily taken by the Belfast Corporation. Clause 12, Section 3, provides that nothing in the Section shall prevent any employer from employing any child who is lawfully employed by him on the passing of the Act. What does that mean? Does it mean that this Education Act is to be adopted as a protection for the sweated labour of a child in the city at the present time? That is the only interpretation I can put upon it. The most amazing Clause of all is Clause 15. We find in that Clause that, The Commissioners, on the application of the education authority, may, within twelve months after the passing of this Act, from time to time make such orders as appear to them necessary for bringing this Act into full operation, and such order may modify any enactment in this or any other Act whether general or local, so far as may appear to the Commissioners necessary for the said purpose. This is a most astonishing Clause. It gives power to the Commissioners of Education to modify all and every educational Act of Parliament that has been passed during the last fifty years. Then we come to Clause 16, which I call the revolutionary Clause, which says: The Commissioners may, after considering any representations made to them on the subject, approve any scheme or revised scheme or modification of an existing scheme submitted to them by the education authority, and thereupon; the scheme or revised or modified scheme shall have effect as if enacted in this Act, and it shall be lawful for the education authority to carry the same into effect as so approved. The Belfast Corporation and the Commissioners of Education will have full power to take the place of Parliament and to do anything they like, on their own, without coming to Parliament for the purpose of legislation. I think the House wilt see that when hon. Members opposite 1249 selected the most innocent member of their party to present this Bill, it is not just the simple thing that they would have the House believe. I object to this Bill first of all on the ground that it is an attempt on the part of a political party, ephemerally successful at the recent election to come here and to use their power to destroy the educational rights and privileges which the minority in the city of Belfast hold sacred. Secondly, I say that it is one of the most extraordinary things I ever knew in Parliament or out of it for any Member of this House to introduce a Bill to establish a new system of education, not for a country, but for a city! A private Bill that touches not only the rights and conditions of everything that is dear to the people whom I represent, but which tries to force it upon the House of Commons because we happen to be weak in this House, and have not numbers behind us. This is done against a minority, by gentlemen who have flourished upon the grievances of minorities during the last fifteen years. What is stranger still is that the Government have set up a Commission to inquire into the whole question of education in Ireland, under the presidency of Lord Killanin. That Commission was composed of eminent educational experts of all phases of politics and religious views. I have not had the opportunity of studying their Report, but I understand that it comes as near universal agreement as it is possible to secure on that or any matter in Ireland, and at the very moment that the Killanin Report, the result of the joint wisdom of these eminent educational experts who have taken evidence from day to day and week to week upon educational problems in Ireland, is being issued, these Gentlemen come along and introduce a Bill taking no cognisance either of Lord Killanin or his Report. They introduce a Bill of a most revolutionary character, dealing with the problem of education in one city under the pretence that there is not sufficient school accommodation, which can be secured at any moment if the right hon. Gentleman (Sir E. Carson) demands it from the Treasury.

§ Sir E. CARSON
I have been demanding it for the last ten years.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
The right hon. Gentleman should make them do it. Why should the ratepayers of Belfast have this burden placed upon their shoulders because the Treasury—I can hardly mention 1250 their name without getting angry—will not disgorge the ill-gotten money that they have stolen from Ireland? Let the right hon. Gentleman join with me in a demand for restitution for Ireland, and let the first charge on the restituted money be devoted to the cause of education, the greatest and noblest purpose to which Irish money can be devoted. Let him drop this Bill. Let us not start again these religious controversies and feuds which have so embittered the educational problem in this country, but let us see whether we cannot mutually join in some great effort to lift this education problem from the mire of religious rancour, and to render this great service to the future men and women of the great city of Belfast, and to do it for them as a joint contribution to the reservoir of public wisdom and justice in this matter.

§ Mr. D. M. WILSON
In supporting this Bill, may I say, as one representing a portion of Ulster outside of Belfast, that I wish that the Bill could be applied to the whole of Ireland. Education in Ireland is chiefly in the hands of the Commissioners of National Education. They are handicapped by the fact that they can disburse only the sums which they receive from the Treasury. For upwards of ninety years they have been severely handicapped often by the Treasury refusing to produce the moneys asked for. The moneys granted by Parliament each year are devoted by the Commissioners to the expenses of their offices and the payment of the teachers, but there are not and never have been any funds in the hands of the Commissioners for the purpose either of building themselves, or of equipping and maintaining schools for primary education in Ireland. Persons who wanted to have schools built had themselves to take over the responsibility of building them. They went to the Government, who gave two-thirds of the amount required, but they themselves had to provide the other one-third. I think that that was always a bad system, and that the State should have undertaken the primary duty of seeing that proper national schools were supplied for the education of the country and that adequate funds were supplied for the equipment and maintenance of those schools. When the schools were built, it was always done by approaching the Government and getting a grant of two-thirds of the cost and supplying the remaining one-third by subscrip- 1251 tion, and the manager, the patron of the school, had afterwards to look to the upkeep of those schools.
The result has been, that all through the country, including Belfast, and including schools of all denominations—for though technically education in Ireland is undenominational in reality you have one of the strictest denominational systems of education that exist anywhere—two-thirds of the cost of building has been supplied by the State, and one-third by subscription. In parts of the country where the population has not increased rapidly, that system might possibly be tolerated. It has not been successful in any part of Ireland, but in places like Belfast, where the population has increased from 350,000 in 1911 to over 414,000, it was absolutely impossible for voluntary effort to keep pace with the demand for schools. The hon. Member for the Falls Division says that the Roman Catholics in Belfast have subscribed sufficient funds to provide ample school accommodation for their children in Belfast, though he says that no doubt they might be improved. We take issue with that statement and say that there is a want of school accommodation in Belfast to the extent of 24 per cent. of their children, and that, with regard to the Protestant section of the community, the want of accommodation is 17 per cent. The problem with which we are faced is that 20,000 children of the Belfast working classes have no place in which to go to school.
In England and Scotland the system has been that the Grants for public education should be aided by a local rate, and the local authority is the education authority in each district. That precedent is followed in this Bill. The Bill is confined to the city of Belfast, because the local authority there, the corporation, were willing to strike a rate in aid of the building and equipment of these schools, but in other parts of the country the local authorities had not signified their willingness to do so. Is this House going to tolerate a continuance of the condition of affairs under which 20,000 children are unable to obtain school accommodation? It is stated in the Report of the Viceregal Commission, to which the hon. Member for the Falls Division referred, that this absolute lack of accommodation exists in Belfast, and that they were astonished at the evidence on the subject, but the 1252 grant by the State of two-thirds of the cost of school building was suspended after the War, nor is it to be forgotten that, for a period before the War, building Grants were stopped by the Treasury, in spite of strong protests by the Commissioners of National Education. So for several years before the War they were unable to get Grants to build schools in the populous districts, and the Grants were stopped entirely during the War. In addition, a sum of £180,000, which was earmarked for primary education, was taken by the Government for other purposes.
The result has been, as is now shown in the Report of the Viceregal Commission, and in their own inspectors' reports, that it is absolutely hopeless for voluntary effort to be expected to overtake the necessity for this building. Their senior inspector reported that the need for suitable accommodation in Belfast was so great that in the absence of a school rate, or of organised effort, it was hopeless to expect that individual effort on the part of managers will ever be competent to deal effectively with the difficulties. The solution of the hon. Member for the Falls Division is that because there is some difference of opinion as to the division of this rate, or its applicability to different sections of the community, nothing should be done.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
No.

§ Mr. WILSON
And that we should wait until we go to the Treasury and demand from them money which they have not got and will not give.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Who says they have not got the funds?

§ Mr. WILSON
And that we should not follow the example of England and Scotland, and have a rate in aid to have these schools built, and, when built, properly equipped and maintained. It is absolutely essential, if we are going to get education in Ireland put on the same basis as in England and Scotland, that there should be a rate in aid of education, not merely in Belfast but all over the country. It will be impossible to get primary education in Ireland into a satisfactory position until that is done. The experience of the last ninety years is that the Treasury have left it to voluntary effort to provide these schools, and a voluntary effort does not provide them. Is there not a duty upon 1253 the locality to see that proper educational facilities are given to the children? For the last ten years these children have been trying in vain to get accommodation in the schools, and, in addition, there are eighty-one schools which cannot be properly equipped and maintained. This Bill is the first step in Ireland to have rates used in aid of education, and for the benefit of the children of the working classes, and we conceive it to be absolutely essential that this rate in aid shall be struck at once, and we can have any discussion that may be necessary as to the division of the rate when it is struck. But if you do not face this problem, and get a rate in aid struck, and create local interest in primary education, and have it properly looked after, the result will be absolutely disastrous in Ireland.
In addition to the building of schools, and their proper equipment in Ireland, the salaries of the teachers should be properly increased. The present salaries are such a scandal that in the Report of the Viceregal Commission increments have been proposed. But even those increments are not satisfactory. They commence at £100, and after some twenty years' service the utmost one of these teachers can get is something like £290, or, if he is an exceptionally good man, he may get a little over £300. Such a salary nowadays is absolutely inadequate for teachers. It is essential that the teachers should be freed from all anxiety in relation from their own position, and should be properly remunerated for the noble service which they render to the State in performance of their duty. Therefore we say if the Government, who are aware of these matters and aware of this want of accommodation, have not come forward themselves to provide a remedy, there is no reason why the city of Belfast should not bring this Bill forward and have these matters pointed out and display the absolute necessity there is that something should be done to improve education and to enable those children to get education which will make them good citizens.
When Belfast does proceed to strike a rate of this kind, all that we are met with by hon. Members opposite is that they accuse us of bigotry and everything of that kind. I think that the hon. Member for the Falls Division has not really read this Bill attentively at all. No schools are taken over by the Belfast Corporation except schools that want to be taken over; none whatever. It is only 1254 schools that signify their willingness to be taken over that are taken over by the Corporation of Belfast. With regard to the other schools, the Corporation of Belfast do not interfere in any way. If the Roman Catholic schools wish to remain as they are, they do not come under the jurisdiction of the Corporation of Belfast at all. But although they do not come under the jurisdiction of the Belfast Corporation, they get considerable benefits under the Bill, because a Clause in the Bill provides that any school, whether willing to come over or not, that wishes to get any funds for the purpose of equipment, heating, cleansing and upkeep, can give an estimate to the corporation and can get the sum of money required provided they show that the school is a suitable one, that it conforms to the rules of the Commissioners of National Education, and that it will be efficiently maintained for a period not less than eighteen months. Therefore, this charge of bigotry against the Belfast Corporation might equally well be levelled against every corporation of every large city in England or Scotland, and of course there is really no foundation for it whatever. If the Roman Catholic schools in Belfast do not wish to be taken over, we are willing to give them for their schools all the assistance which is given to any Protestant school in Belfast. This charge of bigotry is one for which I submit there is no foundation. If this House were to give in to the contention of the hon. Member for the Falls Division the result would be that this scandal would be continued. As the inspector says, it is utterly impossible for voluntary efforts to provide school accommodation for these 20,000 children who have not got it at present, and, in addition to that, to provide the further school accommodation for some 11,000 children who will be deprived of their present schools if the eighty-one schools which have been condemned as insanitary are closed. I would like the House to consider the fact that to expect managers of schools in Ireland to attack the proposition, on the Protestant side at any rate, of suddenly providing school accommodation for some 30,000 children is an absolute impossibility. The Roman Catholic Church may be able to gather funds for that purpose, though I am sure they are not gathered in Belfast, but it would be utterly impossible for individual ministers who really collect these funds to collect funds of anything like that amount for the purpose of accommodating those 1255 children. The reason is owing to the rapid increase in the population of Belfast from 350,000 to 414,000. Therefore, if the corporation themselves are not allowed to strike a rate for the purpose of enabling schools to be built and the schools that are there to be properly equipped, cleansed, and made sanitary, those children will not get any education. We ask the House to say that it is absolutely essential to provide education for these children, such as has been done in England and Scotland, by means of a rate-in-aid In England and Scotland the local authorities, whether corporations or district councils, or borough councils, have been made the local authority for the administration of these funds. When a similar attitude is taken up in Ireland we are accused of nothing but bigotry. In the drafting of this Bill we have simply followed the precedent set in Scotland as nearly as we could. We ask that we should be given the opportunity of striking this rate for the purpose of providing this necessary accommodation, and that when doing that this House will determine that we are not guilty of any bigotry or any desire to assist any one portion of the population of Belfast more than another. We are willing to give to the people whom the hon. Member for the Falls Division represents every advantage to be got out of this rate, which is got by any member of the Protestant community.

§ Mr. HARBISON
I wish to support my hon. Friend the Member for the Falls Division (Mr. Devlin), in moving the rejection of this Bill. I speak as an Ulster man having an equal interest in the education of my brother Ulstermen with any of my friends on the other side of the House. I object to this Bill on principle. It is a Bill brought in for the benefit of one city in the Kingdom of Ireland. On that ground I object to it because it deals with the question of national education, and as such I say there should be no separate treatment for any particular part of Ireland, and that it should be a national Bill for the nation as a whole and not for any part of it. Some hon. Gentlemen opposite have referred to the Scottish Education Bill. I think the Scottish Education Bill is a Bill for the whole of Scotland. It is not a particular Bill for Edinburgh or Glasgow, and I cannot understand why the Ulster Members are so anxious to have a separate Education Bill for the city of Belfast, except for one 1256 reason. The only one I can think of is that it is part of a deliberate policy on the part of the Ulster Members to try to get separate treatment for Belfast and the portions of Ulster which they represent. That is a policy that, and I think I can speak for Ireland as a whole outside the four counties, I will never agree to, and I regret sincerely with my hon. Friend the Member for the Falls Division that the entire representation of Ireland is not here to-day to make a protest against this Bill and the principle of this Bill being brought in. I think that in the whole history of legislation in this House there has never been brought in a Bill which is so unjust to a large minority in the district to which it is to apply. There are 100,000 people in this city of Belfast, no doubt principally working-class people, poor people, who have erected schools at their own expense with a Government Grant-in-Aid, and have equipped them, and, in competition for honours in education, have held their own with any other schools in Ireland. The poor people who have built those schools and have equipped and continued to maintain them are asked now out of their purses to pay for schools of another denomination and of men who are wallowing in wealth. We all know, and are glad to know, that Belfast has made its millions out of the blood that was shed on the plains of Flanders and elsewhere, and out of those millions I think they should do what their humbler brethren have done, and build their own schools out of the millions they have made out of the War. I have listened to the tale that was told from those benches, and, as an Ulsterman and as a citizen of that part of Ireland, I was ashamed. I think the Gentleman who moved the Second Reading said that there were 35,000 children in the city of Belfast who had no school accommodation whatever. I know that the Unionists of Belfast are very generous when it is to make apolitical demonstration; or to show that they and they alone supported this War they could lay down thousands and hundreds of thousands, and when they raised a rebellion they could raise millions, but they cannot raise the few paltry thousands that are necessary to build and equip the schools for the children of their people.
The principle involved in this Bill of public control we at the present moment protest against. I, as an Ulsterman, have had experience of bodies such as the Belfast corporation. Where a question of 1257 religion comes there is no toleration in the management of any institution, let it be a public body, or county council, or district council. No doubt a few paltry offices may be given away, but on a matter of control or of appointing teachers where it is an office of some trust, a Roman Catholic co-religionist of mine will get no support and will not be appointed so long as there is one of another denomination to be appointed On principle we cannot support this Bill, and if there is a new Education Bill necessary—and I think it is necessary, and I yield to no man in my anxiety to see education put on a proper basis in Ireland and to see that we get our fair share of the public funds which we subscribe out of our limited means. At the present time we are subscribing, I believe, over £30,000,000 more than is necessary to run the country, and out of that we get precious little. I am quite prepared to join with my brother Ulstermen on the other side of the House if a proper Bill is brought in dealing with all Ireland as a whole, but not with any particular corner of it. Education is a national matter. It is not a local matter. Education is for the people as a whole, and should be for the people as a whole, and what should be law for Ulster should be law for Connaught; and I, for one, could never vote for this Bill unless the Government took it up or introduced another Bill applying the system to all Ireland.

§ Mr. DONALD
I rise to support this Bill. I cannot claim to be one of those wealthy Belfast men, but what I do claim is to be one of those who have helped to make that city and to build the great industries which at present exist in that great city. I gladly welcome this Bill as one of the measures of reconstruction. No city did more to help the Government during the War in men, money, and munitions, and no city that I know of is spending more money on necessary developments to-day, and certainly education is one of the most necessary. We want to try and give our boys and girls a better ideal than that which is measured by salary and wages. The national school system in Belfast to-day is lamentably deficient, both in point of accommodation and general standard. There are some 286 schools in Belfast, and of these ninety-five have no playground whatever, and that applies equally to Protestant and Roman Catholic schools. I myself was passing a school 1258 while I was over there at Easter, and at this school there are quite a number of Protestant children, although it is a Roman Catholic school. Although we are put down as narrow and bigotted Ulstermen, yet Protestant children are going to that Roman Catholic school. But I regret to say that there was no playground whatever attached to that school, and it was nothing bettor than an ordinary dwelling house. Yet my hon. Friends on the other side say they have collected money and spent money and that they have great schools. What do we find? Taking the tram up Donegall Street, one of the largest schools is there, attached to the Roman Catholic chapel, and going by I could scarcely see the children through the window owing to the dirt on the window, and you could not identify whether it was a school or a factory. That is the state of affairs that exists in Belfast to-day, and that school has no playground either. When the children come out they are confronted with the danger of the trams, and I say that the state of the schools in Belfast is a scandal. I think this Bill does not go far enough. I would welcome compulsory attendance and the abolition of the half-time system. Even as early as eleven years of age boys and girls show special tests of aptitude, but what chance does a boy or a girl have in life if they are taken away from school before fourteen? The total number of children in Belfast between the ages of fourteen and fifteen years is about 8,388, and how many of these do you think are attending school? Only 1,000. Therefore, we may take it that the 7,388 children between the ages of fourteen and fifteen must be at work.
What do I find, as a practical man and a trade unionist myself of some twenty years standing, in the great industrial shipyards of Belfast? I have found that the average apprentices coming into the shipyards to serve their apprenticeship were boys out of the fourth or fifth standard at school, and I say that that state of affairs should not exist, whether in Belfast or in any other city. If this Bill is passed, which I am sure it will, it will go a long way to assist us to see that the boys coming into these big factories will have a chance in life, and I am speaking now for the working classes, and I may say that the working classes of Belfast are unanimous with regard to this Bill. The 1259 working classes of Belfast welcome this Bill. The first object in education is the training of human beings in mind and character as citizens of a free country. Any technical preparation of boys and girls for a particular profession, trade or occupation must be consistent with this principle. We recognise education in its two scientific aspects, first, as a selective agency, and, secondly, as a provision for opportunity. The real object of education is not to spoon-feed boys or girls with facts, but to draw out of them that which is in them. We want to see provision being made for the school-feeding of children in Belfast, and I am sure that hon. Members will agree that it is a very necessary thing that our children should have a good meal in the middle of the day provided in the school. I condemn the system not only in Belfast, but throughout Ireland, whereby children, sent out in the morning with a very poor breakfast, get something like half an hour for lunch and bring a little piece of bread with them. There is no stimulant in that. The child should get a good meal in the middle of the day, and should also get an hour, or an hour and a-half, to get home to enjoy the mid-day meal with the parents. That is. I think, an essential tiling to the education of our children. But we also want to see provision made for the medical inspection of children in our schools similar to that in this country; and, above all, as a trade unionist, I think the payment of the teachers in our country is a scandal. They have not even trade union wages.
I gladly support this Bill, and I hope that any little difference of opinion there maybe can foe squared when the Bill goes into Committee. I hope this Bill will be brought into law, in order that the people of a great industrial city like Belfast—and this is only a first step towards bringing education, as it ought to be, under local control—may have a say in the control of education in our country. I say denominationalism is the curse of Ireland. I would like to see it all under the control of local people and ratepayers. I say that our schools should be, like those in Scotland and England, brought under the control of the people, and I am sure no one will welcome this Bill more than the working classes of Belfast.

§ Mr. T. W. BROWN
I only propose to say a word or two in support of this Bill, and I only propose to deal with one or 1260 two matters raised by hon. Members opposite in opposition to it. It must come, surely, as a surprise to hon. Members in this House that when a great measure like this Education Bill—a measure which involves a great principle, which is going to apply a principle that exists in Engand and in Scotland—is introduced, to find one whole section of the representatives of Ireland joining together to oppose this measure. One would have thought that every Member from Ireland who had the benefit of his country at heart would have been most anxious to see that the widest measure, and the very best possible measure, of education in Ireland, or any part of Ireland, that could be brought in, would be supported by them. I listened very carefully to the objections that were raised by the hon. Gentlemen opposite to this Bill, and before I deal with them, might I say that this Bill is one involving a great principle—the great principle that the people of Ireland should be enabled to raise a rate in aid of any support that they may get from the Treasury for education? That is the principle involved in the Bill. This is only its Second Reading. There may be details in the Bill which may not be of the best, and may require changing. Undoubtedly, when this Bill goes into Committee, there will be great changes. I understand it has been drafted largely on the principle of the Scottish Bill, and follows the Scottish Bill largely in details; but there may be many details suitable for Scotland which are not suitable for Ireland. But in this Bill there is established for the first time the great principle in Ireland that people should be so interested in education as to be willing to pay locally for the encouragement of the education of their own children.
What are the objections that have been raised to it? The hon. Member for Falls (Mr. Devlin), in one of his usual speeches in this House, seemed quite willing to support the principle, and the objections which he raised really are minute. They could be got over easily in Committee, and need not outweigh what is, apparently, his great desire to have a wide and general educational measure for Ireland. The first objection the hon. Gentleman raised was, he said, that this Bill is an attack on the managerial system in Ireland. If it is, I, for one, am glad of it, because one of the greatest curses of the system of primary education in Ireland has been—I am not saying the managerial system—but 1261 the dissatisfaction of the teachers in Ireland with the managerial system. Whether rightly or wrongly, the teachers in Ireland have complained for years that they cannot get the best out of their schools, and that they cannot get the best out of themselves, so long as the present managerial system continues. And for the hon. Member for Falls to say that there has been no outcry in Ireland against the managerial system, that there has been no popular demand for its change, would make one almost wonder whether the hon. Member for Falls ever visits Ireland at all. Does he ever read an Irish newspaper? Has he any correspondents in Ireland who are interested in the educational question? Because if he has, 90 per cent. of them complain of the present managerial system. Therefore, the first objection that the hon. Member takes to this Bill is, I think, very ill-founded in fact. What is his second objection? Of course, I do not propose to deal with the hon. Gentleman's references to the bigotry of Belfast and its sweated workers. We are accustomed to that, and many of the Members of this new House, who are only now making the acquaintance of the hon. Member, are, I think, beginning to realise that he does not really mean what he says. But the hon. Member objects that this Bill has been introduced here when a very large number of the Irish representatives are absent.
I am surprised that the hon. Member makes that point. He also makes the point that this Bill only deals with the city of Belfast, and does not deal with all Ireland. I for one wish with all my heart—and I think I am speaking for a great many people in Ireland—that this Bill, instead of applying to one district, did apply to the whole of Ireland, north, south, east, and west. If the hon. Gentleman will accept this Bill, and accept an Amendment that it has to apply to the whole of Ireland, I, for one, will support that Amendment when the Bill is in Committee. But I wonder how many councils, how many other corporations in Ireland, how many county councils throughout the country, and outside the Unionist, or northern part of Ireland, would back up the hon. Member for the Falls Division in that proposal? This is brought in for the city of Belfast to establish a great principle. The hon. Member cannot say that Belfast is not fully represented in this House. There are ten Members for the city. They are all here to-day. So that so far as Bel- 1262 fast city is concerned, its full representation is here. This covers the two objeciions made to this Bill by the hon. Member. I trust that the House will not be carried away by the rhetoric of the hon. Member in dealing with this matter. For my own part, and on behalf of the constituency which I represent in the North of Ireland, not in Belfast at all, but the adjoining county—where we hope to see the same principle applied at a very early date—I give my hearty support to this Bill. I ask hon. Members who are not Irish Members, but who enjoy these privileges in their own countries, not to oppose the same privileges for the children in Ireland.

§ Mr. R. M'LAREN
I rise, as one who has taken a good deal of interest in education since I was a young man, to support this Bill. Reference has been made to the system in vogue in Scotland, and I am thankful to the hon. Member who introduced the Bill for what he said as to the Scottish people and their method of education. If it is not out of place, may I say that we have had in Scotland a good scheme of education for many years? Many years ago, before the Act of 1872, the Education Act (Scotland) Bill was introduced: even then our system of education was celebrated. In the town to which I belong, Airdrie in Lanarkshire, we were so anxious for the education, not only of the school children, but in the way of encouraging the people to be readers, to learn the history of their country, and so on, to read the best books, that we were the first town to put 1d. in the £ on the rate to open a library for the people. In any case it is the fact, and a most important matter for the nation, that a good system of education makes the nation strong and robust. It is rather a strange thing to me to see here the remarks made in connection with the introduction of this Bill. I had no idea as a Scotsman that things were so far back in Ireland. It seems to me a scandalous state of affairs that so many as 14,000 or 15,000 children should have no school accommodation. It is also a scandal that the accommodation that is provided should be of such a bad and insanitary nature. The sooner this question is tackled the better, not only for the three Kingdoms, but for Ireland itself.
It is a pity that the Belfast people are bringing in their Bill only for Belfast. I think the Government are to blame for not 1263 bringing in a Bill to take up the whole matter in Ireland. In Scotland for many years we have had a tax on the people for educational purposes. We have recently passed an Education Bill here which in many respects is very admirable, but in other respects might have gone a bit further. I am glad that those concerned with this Bill are so appreciative of the position in Scotland that they are copying Scotland; but voluntary efforts will never give you a good educational system. The sooner you dispense with it the better and try to get the Government to understand that if the country is to be made prosperous, as you expect it shall be, it can only be by having such a Bill introduced as shall bring matters to about the same condition as they are in Scotland, England and Wales. Reference has been made to training colleges. It is a surprising thing to me to learn that before a teacher can go out as a qualified teacher he has to go to Dublin. It seems strange. In Scotland we have training schools, and every man and woman has the right to go to the school where he or she chooses to be trained, and to get their certificate from that school. Nobody questions whether they have got their certificate in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, St. Andrews, or elsewhere. This condition of affairs ought to be remedied at once if you are to have a good system of training your teachers.
I was surprised also to learn about the salaries of your teachers. At this time of day it is a scandal that men who train for the teaching profession for years, and go to and get through college, should be asked to work for a miserable pittance of £100 a year. I have boys of sixteen employed by me to-day who are making £4 a week—that is £200. You ask the teachers to work for this miserable pittance—with the expectation by and by, when they get old, of a probable pension—I do not know whether they are promised it or not—whilst others may be enjoying war bonuses, and some of our retired Civil servants are getting far more. The thing should be attended to. The half-time system is a very bad one. I should advise hon. Members to do their best to get rid of it. When a boy goes to school he should have his full time there. Then as to compulsory education. I think you will make a great mistake unless in this Education Bill you do not make education compulsory.

§ Mr. MOLES
It is compulsory.

§ Mr. M'LAREN
I am glad to hear that, because I gathered from one hon. Member who spoke earlier that it was not.

§ Sir E. CARSON
May I say to the hon. Gentleman that we have at present a compulsory system in Ireland, but it cannot be carried out in Belfast, because there is nowhere to compel the children to go to?

§ Mr. M'LAREN
I accept that. I do not think you will ever get a good system unless you compel the people, to send their children to school. I am glad that in Scotland we have done that very effectively, and we have a good system of education both for primary and for technical education as well.
I was very much surprised to find that in Scotland at the last election a very large number of people who came to vote voted "illiterate." In my district a very large number of these were of Roman Catholic persuasion. That to me is pitiable. The great object we should have in our systems of education is to give such an education as to enable the people to vote straight, and to abolish illiteracy. There is no reason why the Irish people should not rise to be as good in these respects as the Scottish people. After all, our strength does not so much come from the climate, but from our education. We think we are a very superior class of people and I think Irishmen come very near us.

An HON. MEMBER
Give us a chance!

§ Mr. M'LAREN
I do not think the time is far distant when you may be able to take a place such as we have done in Scotland. I have much pleasure in saying that I wish to support this Bill as heartily as I can, though I would rather a Bill had been brought in by the Government to apply to the whole of Ireland.

§ Mr. MOLES
I desire to convey to the hon. Gentleman who has just sat down our keen sense of appreciation of the spirit he has manifested in regard to the efforts we are making. If the Government have not seen their way to bring in an Education Bill for the whole of Ireland that is not our fault, and we are resolved that if the Government will not deal with this matter for the whole country that we will do our best to get such a measure for Belfast. The main case against this Bill was submitted by the hon. Member for the Falls Division of Belfast (Mr. Devlin), who 1265 wound up a very vivacious speech by telling us that the proper remedy was to go to the Treasury, a Treasury, mind you, which the hon. Member himself told us he could never name without indignation, and which had robbed Ireland and refused to disgorge the money. That is the source he now tells us to go to. It is like the case of the lady when asked to wed: 'Go to father,'" she said, when he asked her to wed, Now, she knew that he knew that her father was dead; And she knew that he knew the life he had lead. So she knew that he knew what she meant when she said 'Go to father.' With regard to what we have stated as to the condition of primary education in Belfast, the hon. Member opposite told us that the same picture could have been painted any time in the last ten years, and that this was only a sort of death-bed repentance we were witnessing now. I think the hon. Member must have been asleep for at least thirty years, because so long ago as 1904 Dr. Dale, one of the chief inspectors of schools for England, at the instance of my hon. and learned Friend and others who represented us at that period, was sent over specially to investigate this problem, and his report is a matter of common knowledge, so much so that I cannot understand how anyone so wide awake as the hon. Member can have been so profoundly asleep over this business. Dr. Dale dealt with the conditions in Dublin and Belfast, and contrasted them with England since the Act of 1870, and he said: Naturally the central authority can insist upon defective school accommodation being made good, and in default of it being done by voluntary effort, then it can be done by the responsible local authority which it has power to establish. He points out, also, that the local authority has no power to require new schools to be built or to hasten the completion, and he expressed the conviction that until a local authority is established in the large towns in Ireland no satisfactory solution of the defects I have pointed out can be obtained. That is the opinion of one of the highest authorities we know on educational matters. The inspectors of the National Board of Education, and even the Commissioners themselves, have again and again called attention to this matter, and in their most recent Report they say: The need for suitable accommodation is so great that in the absence of a school rate or of 1266 organised effort it is perfectly hopeless to expect that individual effort on the part of the managers will ever be competent to deal with this difficulty. That is why we are introducing this Bill. We recognise that voluntary effort has broken down, just as in England arid Scotland in 1870 you were forced to recognise that voluntary effort has broken down, and we are coming forty-nine years after to ask you to do for us what you then did for yourselves, and to tell you that just as at that time you were prepared to put your hands in your pocket and find the money, we are prepared in the same way to put our hands into our pockets and do our duty handsomely. Voluntary effort will not improve the position, and it is useless to pretend that it will. I do not care what your problem is, if you make it sufficiently large and maintain the strain sufficiently long, voluntaryism will break down. It broke down in your military institution, as it did in the case of education in your own country. It has broken down for the last fifty years especially in Belfast.
The city of Belfast is an outstanding example of a great and growing city. It multiplied its population by the astonishing figure of twelve times in a century, and how can voluntary effort keep pace with such a rate of progress as that? I call attention to this fact, that that increase has all been industrial, and you cannot expect these workers toiling for their daily bread in shipyards and factories and public works to head subscription lists or pay any substantial sums to movements set on foot to find the necessary one-third in order to extract the additional two-thirds from the Education Board. It cannot be done. It has been tried, and I am here of my own-personal knowledge to pay tribute to the splendid liberality these people have manifested in proportion to their means. They have done all you can expect, and you have no right to ask them to give further any more than you have the right to ask your own people to undertake a task which they could not discharge and which we cannot. It is the duty of the State to undertake it. We all share the same citizenship, and you should afford to us in this matter the same rights as you give elsewhere.
My hon. Friend complains that we are choosing a highly inopportune moment to come forward with this Bill because now the seventy Sinn Fein Members are not 1267 in attendance. Whose fault is it that they are not here. Is it ours? [An HON. MEMBER: "Yes."] If I were tempted to take up that point I should say "No," and I could give the hon. Member opposite substantial reasons for my opinion from no other authority than himself. It is not our fault that they are not here. You might as well tell us that the whole legislative machinery of this House ought to be paralysed, and no public business done until they come here. This is a problem that cannot wait, and the case for it is just as good whether the Sinn Feiners are absent or present. If this Bill has merits it should not be rejected because the Sinn Fein Members are not here. The hon. Member opposite told us that we have not the courage or the public spirit which we ought to have to put our hands into our own pockets and raise the money for this particular purpose, and he said that we have no right to complain that we have not got our fair share. Our case is that what has been done for the working-class population in all your great centres of population in this country you are entitled to do for us. We have the right to go further and say that you are entitled to do it for the entire country in this Bill, and we would do it. Then the hon. Member said that education was a profoundly undeceiving influence in the matter of Unionism, and that just in proportion as you were educated you ceased to be a Unionist and become a Nationalist. If that is so, there is no Member in this House who should more stoutly support this Bill, because it is the one chance that he has of getting a foothold in Belfast. To put it plainly, it is all nonsense. It is the sort of thing in which he frequently indulges for the purpose of amusing this House. He told us that the dock labourers are better paid than the teachers. That is a melancholy and entirely true fact. We are seeking by this Bill to make an end of it and to see that the teaching profession with all the training that it involves shall be at least as well remunerated as the vocation of a dock labourer, and we are being obstructed in that effort by the hon. Gentleman and his friends. Let them understand that if they succeed in their efforts it means that the teaching profession will remain in that unremunerative condition not only in Belfast but elsewhere, because they must not imagine that a stone-hearted Treasury are going to be en- 1268 couraged and bucked up by the rejection of this Bill. On the contrary, you will show that you approve of the starvation of education that has been their policy for so long.
The hon. Member told us that this Bill is not the way to improve education in Belfast or to raise the salary and status of the teachers. If this is not the way, what is the alternative of the hon. Member opposite? What do they propose to alter the existing state of things which they decry as much as we do, but which apparently they are determined that they will not change or improve? The hon. Gentleman has given no answer to that question, and I do not anticipate that any of his friends will answer it. Their position is the maintenance of the status quo with all that it means. He quoted certain Treasury figures, and pointed out that the Treasury were treating Ireland scandalously in this matter. That is precisely our case. The difference between us is that we put forward a Bill that proposes to change the matter at least in respect of Belfast, and they put forward nothing and propose to leave the position unchanged and unimproved. I think that our position is at least as creditable as theirs, and that we can defend it as much to our own consciences and to public opinion as he and his friends can defend theirs. He told us, when he did venture to hint at a remedy, that the remedy was a rebellion, and, when he was interrupted by an hon. Gentleman below him, he said that if appealed to he would invoke a strike. We have had some experience of rebellion in this country and some experience of strikes, and I feel sure, speaking sincerely the mind of hon. Gentlemen opposite, that it is the last thing they really and seriously desire is either another rebellion or another strike.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
Take care! The right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the Duncairn Division of Belfast (Sir E. Carson), is beside you.

§ Mr. MOLES
I am accustomed elsewhere to frivolous interruptions from my hon. Friends and I usually ignore them.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
Especially when you cannot answer them.

§ Mr. MOLES
There are some things that are so silly that there is no answer to them. We suggest, instead of either a rebellion or a strike, that we take the 1269 course that was taken with so much success in England and Scotland. We are perfectly sure, if that course is followed, that we shall get identical results from identical causes. The hon. Gentleman paid a great tribute to the Belfast Corporation. He spoke of them as a body of efficient administrators, and as decent men, in so far as the ordinary affairs of public like are concerned—I dare say that he would probably extend his charity to cover their private life as well—but he said that when they came to touch this question of education they become immediately transformed into a body of educational butchers dealing with a large mass of wholly uneducated and indefensible lambs. That is the condition of Belfast in the mind of my hon. Friend. I have had occasion recently to discuss this very question with him elsewhere, and I have pointed out to him that so far from there being a particle of truth in that charge we can stand up and show that there is as much breadth of mind and toleration of treatment in every Department of our public life as is to be found in any city in the three Kingdoms. I showed him that a judicial tribunal, over which an eminent member of his own faith presided, found that the Roman Catholic population of the city received more than their due proportion of appointments.

Mr. O'CONNOR
What tribunal?

§ Mr. MOLES
Justice Day's Commission, and my hon. Friend is not so ignorant about it as he makes out. A charge was directly levelled against the Corporation of Belfast by a former Chief Secretary. It was investigated on the spot, and it was found that the Roman Catholic population receive back in wages and salaries more than three times the amount they pay in rates to the city. Only recently my hon. Friend the Member for the Falls Division (Mr. Devlin) stated from his place on that bench that the Belfast Harbour Board, like the city council, was a bigoted, intolerant, and insufferable board. He compelled an investigation of that charge, and he elicited the astonishing fact that, so far from that being true, more than half the entire employés of the board were of the Roman Catholic faith, and that the man into whose hands was entrusted the question of appointments was an intimate personal friend of the hon. Gentleman himself. I showed him that when an important public appointment fell vacant—one of the most 1270 important appointments in the city—so far from the Grand Master or the Deputy Grand Master of the Orange Order being appointed, it was his own election agent that was put into the office. I showed him that when a corresponding appointment fell vacant in the neighbouring county, it was my hon. Friend's registration agent who was put into it.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
Not by the local authorities.

§ Mr. MOLES
That is not the point. It was at his request.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
And in spite of the opposition of the right hon. and learned Gentleman (Sir E. Carson) beside the hon. Member.

§ Mr. MOLES
It just shows the grip that the hon. Member has got upon these things and that we have not got. So much for this supposed bigotry. It is mere hogwash, and hon. Gentlemen know it. They tell us that they will fight this Bill line by line and Clause by Clause. We know their methods, and we know that when they make a promise of that kind they always redeem it. They want to know where this Bill has emanated. That has become a stock charge now. There is always a mystery into which my hon. Friends are perpetually peering. There is always a conspiracy, or a plot, or a man trap, or a spring gun that they are discovering. If it were not so tragic it would, be comic. My hon. Friend the Member for Donegal (Mr. E. J. Kelly) is hearing this for the first time, and I can see that it astonishes him. If he attended this House and its Committees a little more regularly, he would get to know how the game is played on the other side. The hon. Gentleman has told us that his faith had not a single representative on this Committee which was set up for the purpose of making inquiries. I hold a copy of the minutes of the corporation in my hand, giving a record of the attendances, and it shows that two very distinguished members of that corporation who were in attendance in the outer Lobby only a few hours ago were there and voted. That is the sort of thing which is attempted to be foisted upon this House as another illustration of the bigotry and intolerance that the House is asked to believe exists in Belfast. Those gentlemen were on the Committee and remained members of it to the very end. They invited everybody, including the Roman Catholic bishop for the diocese 1271 himself and certain of his leading ministers to attend. He did not attend, but some others did. Supposing they did not attend, whose fault is it? If they are determined to hold aloof from this Bill, and not attempt to shape it along lines advantageous to themselves, is it open to them to fling a charge at us, and to say that, "We were not represented on this Committee, though it is perfectly true that we excluded ourselves." Is that a logical charge? Surely it is not. We admit quite frankly and fully that the whole condition of primary education in Belfast is entirely wrong. We are prepared to pay the price for putting it right, and we ask the House to give us the necessary facilities for so doing. That is all that we ask. It is not too much to ask, and I hope that the House will believe that it is not too much for them to concede. I quoted a moment ago the fine example of Scotland. We have a good deal in common with our Scottish friends; indeed, one of the worst allegations that can be levelled against us from the other side of the House is that we are as dour and obstinate and determined as are Scotsmen, and that we have got too much of the base, brutal, and bloody Saxon in us. The primary schools of Belfast are really a blot upon civilisation, and we want to put an end to that state of affairs. We want them superseded by schools as good as any that you can find in Scotland or in Birmingham, where the average attendance reaches the astonishing figure of 18 per cent. of the population, which practically exhausts all the children of school age. Glasgow has even gone one better. Glasgow believes so profoundly in educational facilities as a means of making good citizens that they have actually provided school accommodation in excess of present needs and have made provision for the future for 30,000 children. We are not aiming at anything so ambitious, but we are aiming at seeing reproduced in Belfast the cardinal feature of the educational life of Glasgow, Birmingham and other great cities. Every authority that has investigated this question have shown that this position is special to Dublin and Belfast. The objection has been raised that we are drawing the line at Belfast. The circumstances compel us to take that course. We propose to establish an education authority and to impose an education rate, therefore it is plain as noonday that if we are going to impose an education rate we can only impose it in the area 1272 over which we have jurisdiction. If we had proposed to make this Bill applicable to Antrim, Down, Monaghan, Cavan and elsewhere we should have been met with the objection that it was a monstrous Bill and that we had no right to seek to impose an education rate on areas over which we had no jurisdiction. That would have been a fair argument. We are asked whether steps have been taken or why they have not been taken successfully years ago. That is a proper question and I will give the answer. It is because this project has always been opposed from the same quarter from which it is opposed now. It is because this opposition has hitherto been successful that nothing has been done. So long as that state of affairs continues, nothing will be done. We hope that we are appealing now to a House that will take a larger, wider and broader view of the question and make an end of a condition of things which has now become absolutely intolerable.
It was said on behalf of the Opposition that the Roman Catholic population, by voluntary effort, provides all the schools necessary for those of its own faith, and it does not see why those of the Protestant faith should not similarly provide for their own needs. The hon. Member said that a power of taxation for such a purpose could not safely be put into the hands of a public authority such as it is proposed to establish. He entered at large into certain figures which he held justified his opposition. I asked for the year of those figures, because I recognised them. The hon. Member did not give the correct year, although I believe he did so unintentionally. Those figures are six years old and the position has grown correspondingly worse in the six years. I have, and I know he has, had in his possession the results of investigations carried out by the school attendance committee in Belfast in conjunction with the public officer of health so recently as August of last year. I give them to the hon. Gentleman, if he has not already seen them, although I am certain that he has. What is the net result? I will deal with certain of his own schools which he affirms are in a satisfactory condition, and I will accept his judgment as to whether the position is satisfactory. They have not made provision—I say it with perfect sincerity and some knowledge of this matter—for the needs of their own faith. They have not even made corresponding pro- 1273 vision for those of their own faith. For the Roman Catholic population of school age in the city he gave the figure of 17,061. That is correct He gave the school accommodation as being in excess of 13,000. That is not so. In this document the accommodation of every school from first to last is set out, and the grand total of accommodation is 12,700, including the Christian Brothers Schools, showing a clear shortage of 4,360, or 24 per cent. The Protestant population of school age is 50,170, and the actual accommodation is 44,350, or a shortage of accommodation round about 15 per cent.
That is calculated upon the low average of the population of school attendance being only 16 per cent. instead of 18 per cent. as in England and Scotland. If you take the higher figure, the position will be correspondingly worse. Let me take a typical example or two. There is Millfield school, a mixed school of boys and girls, whose maximum accommodation is 372, the number upon the roll being 621, with an average daily attendance of 413. St. Patrick's School has accommodation for 321, the number on the roll is 582; St. Peter's School has accommodation for 280, and has 393 on the roll; St. Joseph's has accommodation for 194, and 301 on the roll, This gives the accommodation in different areas for 1,167, and upon the roll 1,897, or nearly twice the accommodation. All these cases are selected from different areas of Roman Catholic schools. They do not admit of interpretation except that the conditions are worse in the case of my hon. Friend's faith, and they ought to be at least as keen about making an alteration in the condition of affairs as we are. It is complained that the Catholics object to be taxed in order to provide the Protestant faith with schools. That will not be the position, and my hon. Friend well knows it. The 1912 investigation, to which I have alluded, showed that less than one-tenth of the taxation was paid by his faith, while they are one-fourth of the population. They will need at least one-fourth of the new school room, and will contribute only one-tenth under the new taxation scheme.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Are you not sick of that old wheeze?

§ Mr. MOLES
If the hon. Member had been sick of it an hour earlier I should not have been sick of it now.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
We have heard repeatedly the charge that Catholics are only one-fourth of the population and only pay one-tenth or one-twentieth of the rates. That has been trotted out in the House of Commons and elsewhere dozens of times. What is the fact? It is true that the persons who pay the rates are mostly Unionists, but the people who reside in the houses on which the rates are paid are largely Nationalists. It is the fellow who pays the rates who claims to be the ratepayer, whereas it is the tenant in the house who pays the rates in his rent. That is one of the scandals.

§ Mr. MOLES
Does the hon. Member I imagine that the only persons who indirectly pay rates through rent are all Nationalists?

§ Mr. DEVLIN
No.

§ Mr. MOLES
Three-fourths of them are Unionists. This lame excuse was tried before. It was investigated by the corporation and riddled and exposed there as I have riddled and exposed it here.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Did that take place before the electoral committee?

§ Mr. MOLES
If Irish wit is to become so cheap as that, it is time we tried something else. It took place in open corporation. In all these excuses the hon. Gentleman is trotting out now he is only the purveyor of the stale goods of other merchants in this matter. They have carried them to market and they have been repudiated and thrown back to them as I repudiate and throw them back now. I repeat, that so far from Nationalists being taxed for the benefit of Protestants in this particular matter, it is the Protestants who will be taxed for the benefit of Catholics. We are willing to be taxed for it. We say that their right to a better educational condition of affairs is just as good as ours. We go further and say that we are prepared to help them to get it. That is part of the difference beween us. We have put a concrete scheme before the House that will remedy this wrong condition of affairs. It can only be blocked and made inoperative in one way—that is by the opposition of my hon. Friend and his Friends, who will condemn the whole youth of our city to the condition of ignorance hitherto imposed upon them. The opposition can only succeed if it desires to block and 1275 destroy this Bill in Committee, or secures a defeat for it at the hands of this House. I submit I have made out a clear case why the House should give the Bill a Second Reading. If we get any tribunal moved by common sense and due regard for human interests, we can justify it before any Committee, and ultimately put it on the Statute Book, and bring about a profound change of conditions which is needed in Belfast, which will not stop in Belfast, but proceed in ever-widening circles to revivify the whole condition of the country's life.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
The hon. Gentleman who has just addressed the House has certainly left nothing to be desired in the direction of vehemence. He did not leave it open to any of his Friends on the same bench to accuse him of being too economical in the distribution of his vituperation. The more inaccurate he became the more vehement and vituperative he became. I have heard the hon. Gentleman on many occasions in Ireland and in Committee upstairs, and I know something about his volubility and his resources, and I have no hesitation in predicting for him, if he remains long enough in this House, that he will become an efficient obstructor. As to a rebellion, almost with tears in his eyes and sobs in his voice, he assured the House that the last thing he and his friends desired is another rebellion. He was aghast at the suggestion of my hon. Friend the Member for Falls (Mr. Devlin) that the best cure for this evil was another rebellion. Where did the hon. Gentleman get such horror of a rebellion?

§ Mr. DEVLIN
When he had to put it into operation.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
He wrote more leading articles, wasted more bottles of ink, and more reams of paper in proposing a revolution than any other Member of this House. Now he comes here and swallows all his own speeches and calls upon the House to witness that there is nothing more horrible to his mind than another rebellion. I welcome his conversion. "There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth." The thing that surprised me was the audacity with which he condemned the suggestion of a rebellion, standing, as he was, side by side with the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the Duncairn Division.

§ Mr. MOLES
I was in good company.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
If he had gone on with the rebellion he would not have been there.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
I should think if he had gone on with the rebellion the right hon. Gentleman (Sir E. Carson) would probably be on the Woolsack at present.

§ Sir E. CARSON
I do not want to be there.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
I do not suggest that at all, but that is what usually happens to Tory rebels in Ireland. They all get to the Woolsack or the Cabinet and the Nationalist rebels get to the scaffold. That is the difference. I congratulate the hon. Member (Mr. Moles) on his conversion in regard to rebellion. He was horrified when we said we would fight this Bill Clause by Clause and line by line.

§ Mr. MOLES
No; I expressed no such feeling of horror.

§ Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER (Sir E. Cornwall)
I would ask the hon. Member not to interrupt.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
I do not complain of interruption. I like interruption. There is no interruption that comes from that bench that does not give us an opportunity of effective reply. I am very sorry you have drawn the line against interruption. We have had experience of the hon. Member on some Committees upstairs. I do not know anyone whose will to obstruct is more pronounced than his. It is only the capacity that he lacks. But he has taken lessons from us up there, and I am hopeful he will prove an apt pupil, and that after a short course of training he will be able to view obstruction more complacently than he does at present. We shall fight this Bill, Clause by Clause, line by line, and word by word.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
And letter by letter.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
Moreover, even if it were to obtain legislative sanction, which it has not the remotest chance of obtaining, it would be met in Belfast by the Catholics with a weapon which we have been taught by very illustrious people in this country to use. We have learnt a lesson from them, and we shall not hesitate to apply it—that is the doctrine of passive resistance—and no Catholic ratepayer will pay the rate which will be struck under this Bill. If the Government cares to embark upon a struggle of that kind, they are quite welcome to do it, but I doubt very much whether they are so foolish as 1277 to plunge into a morass of trouble of that kind. The hon. Member stated that there were two Catholic members on the Committee which drafted this Bill.

§ Mr. MOLES
No.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
The hon. Member said, when I challenged him, that there were two Catholic members on the original Committee of fifty in the Corporation. He went on to say these two Catholic members remained on the Committee till the very end of the deliberations.

§ Mr. MOLES
On the original Committee of the Corporation one representative from each ward was chosen. That included one from each of the two wards represented by the Nationalists.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
The hon. Member went further. He may not have intended to go further, but he did. I asked whether the members of the Committee were fifty, and he said, "Yes, and they remained members until the very end of the Committee."

§ Mr. MOLES
That is not the point. The hon. Member says I described them as having been members of the Drafting Committee. That is not so.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
The hon. Member stated that these gentlemen were members of the Committee of fifty. That was an explicit answer to an explicit question. That answer is totally untrue. There were no Catholic members on that Committee.

§ Mr. MOLES
Yes, it is quite true.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
I have only to say that the hon. Member's statement that two Catholics served on that Committee of fifty till the conclusion of its labours is an absolutely unfounded statement. There were no Catholic Members on that Committee. He also stated—and this a sample of the reckless assertions in which he indulged—that these two Catholic gentlemen were here in the House of Commons to-day and that he saw them in the Lobby.

§ Mr. MOLES
No.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
What did the hon. Member say?

§ Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER
I cannot allow these continued interruptions. The hon. Member must be allowed to go on with his speech.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
I am speaking in the recollection of the House. The hon. Member has stated most distinctly that these two gentlemen were in the Lobby of the House to-day.

§ Mr. MOLES
No, no.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
That statement is also absolutely untrue.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
You distinctly stated that they were here to-day. Evidently everything the hon. Member thought he was saying he did not mean to say, and everything we are trying to pin him to he says he never said or he did not mean to say, and it is very difficult under these circumstances to follow his argument. He told us that he was shocked to hear my hon. Friend (Mr. Devlin) say anything about the Harbour Board He said an intimate personal friend of my hon. Friend had made inquiries into the matter and was quite satisfied with the result.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Who was that?

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
I suppose he will tell us now he never said it.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Did you ever say that?

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
The total salaries paid by the Belfast Harbour Board, this model of toleration, amount to £11,269, and out of that only £250 goes to Catholics, and that all goes to one Catholic. They have only one Catholic employéon their entire salary list, yet the hon. Member has the effrontery to say that Catholics get appointments on these public boards in proportion to the rates they pay. They do not.

§ Mr. MOLES
What about the wages list?

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
I cannot answer as to the question of wages. [Interruption.] The Demosthenes of South Tyrone need not be so funny!

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Nor the Cicero from East Down!

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
The reason we cannot analyse the question of wages is this: There is an annual return issued by the Belfast Harbour Board showing all who are on the salaried list. We can go to it and find out how many Catholics there are, and there is only one, and that cannot be contradicted. But there is no list of those receiving wages. We have no check upon 1279 that at all, except the reckless statement of the hon. Member. He could say if he liked that the Catholic wage earners form 100 per cent of the whole, and that they are getting 100 per cent. of the money, and we could not produce names to contradict him. But if we did give a few names he would get up and say, "I never said that," or "I never meant to say it." He would run away from the statement as he has run away from every statement he has made to-day. That is the record of the Harbour Board. Then the corporation, which is to have the distribution of all the education moneys under this Bill, which is to be the education authority, which is to hold the scales impartially between the Catholics and Protestants in that community—this is their record: There are 437 salaried officials in the council's employ. The total amount is £68,723. How much of that goes to Catholics—to those who hold the religious opinions of nearly a third of the population? £768. The hon. Member will tell us "you do not give us the wages." There is not a Catholic employéunder the Belfast Corporation, other than those included in that £768, with a higher rank than that of a scavanger.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
And not a political scavenger, like some hon. Members here!

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
There are twenty-five medical officers under the corporation. They have not got one Catholic. Let me give another instance. When the Belfast Corporation Bill was passing through the House some years ago, in conjunction with my hon. Friend we got a Clause inserted providing that to the appointment of clerks under the Belfast Corporation the principle of open competitive examination should be applied. We wanted no preference. All we asked was fair play for all and favour for none, and we said, "Let the best man win in the competitive examination." The House of Commons, and it was a Tory House of Commons, having heard the record of the Belfast Corporation, said that this was an eminently reasonable proposal, and they adopted our Clause, and compelled the Be fast Corporation to establish a competitive examination for clerks. What did these broadminded, tolerant gentlemen do? They decided to drive a coach-and-four through the Act, and they have had a very ingenious way of doing it. They said, 1280 "The House of Commons says we must have a competitive examination. All right, we will have it, and we will instruct the examiners to send up to us a list of six names"—I think it was six—"of the best-qualified candidates according to their report," and the corporation proceeded to vote on which of the six should get the job. It was not the first man on the list. Again and again it happened that a Catholic was at the top of the list. Was he ever appointed a clerk? Not at all. A camel would have as much chance of getting through the eye of a needle as a Catholic of getting an appointment there, even though he is first in the competitive examination. The spokesman of this corporation gets up with a profession of broadmindedness and tolerance, and horror of bigotry, and complains that we should dare to say that there is any such thing as bigotry in that corporation. The House has only to listen to the sort of speeches that are made from that bench to know where the bigots are. I am only delighted when the hon. Gentleman and his Friends get up to make speeches, because they never make a speech which does not make three or four converts for Home Rule. Every time one of them delivers an oration the English and Scottish Members who listen to it go out of the House and say,. "Heavens, what a dull lot those fellows, are!" That is why I was very sorry Mr. Deputy-Speaker would not allow him to go on. Any time I can ever get one of them to make a speech I will give every assistance in my power to obtain a House for the purpose. The hon. Gentleman proceeded with that old story of his. I have read it about seventy times in the leading articles in the "Belfast Evening Telegraph," which he writes. He says that the Catholics in Belfast only pay about one-twentieth of the rates of the whole community. How is that arrived at? Has bigotry been raised to such a fine art in the city of Belfast that they mark the religion of every ratepayer? If not, how do they get the exact proportion? In the same way they have a census of the religion of every wage earner, and according to that they are able to tell to a penny what the Catholics are drawing in wages every year. How is that done? I would like one of them to tell us. How are they able to tell the religion of every ratepayer and bring the calculation out so closely? The hon. Gentleman says that we do it. But we do it from the published records 1281 in the salary list. That is quite easily done, but how does the city corporation know the religion of every ratepayer? All I can say is that that is bigotry in excelsis. Such a record, I venture to say, is not to be found in any city in the United Kingdom or any city in the world

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Constantinople.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
What are the facts? The bulk of the Catholic population are of the artisan class, and that being so, their rates are included in their rents. The bulk of the landlords, nearly all, are Unionists. [An HON. MEMBER: "The slum-owners!"] All the slum-owners are Unionists. The result is that when the hon. Gentleman makes a calculation from the religious census kept in the City Hall, he puts down all the landlords as Unionists and Protestants, and takes no account of the tenants, or of the fact that the tenants are paying the rates. The truth of the matter is that, just as the Catholics form about one-fourth of the total population of Belfast, so they pay, roughly speaking, one-fourth of the rates. The hon. Gentleman may shake his head, but he cannot shake the facts. The facts are obvious. Anything more pitiful than the suggestion that the Catholics pay only one-twentieth of the rates of the city of Belfast cannot be imagined. As far as I am concerned there is nothing more objectionable than the continued reiteration of these religious controversies. I think it must be repugnant to the finer feelings of every Member of this House. The spirit which is shown has not a counterpart in any city of the United Kingdom. The hon. Gentleman thought fit to make a remark, in the course of his peroration, to the effect that the Catholics were being generously treated. I have only this to say, that he is not worthy to blacken the boots of the Catholics whom he is attacking. It throws a flood of light upon the spirit with which the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues approach the question of giving fair play to the Catholic community. The hon. Member for Ormeau explained his long silence upon the question of education by suggesting that forces were always at work against them. That was the Tory party, which has been sitting for goodness knows how long in this House. As many of them as can get on the Government Bench are sitting on it already, and the rest all think they ought to be there. But can he tell me, during the whole history of that party, 1282 of a single measure introduced into this House with regard to Irish education? It only comes from the fertile brain of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Duncairn. The brilliant idea occurred to him that they should start this education stunt and use it as a red-herring to drag across the path of Home Rule. They would pretend, he thought, to be tremendously anxious to get everything possible for the social benefit of the people. If only they would drop Home Rule, they should have everything worth fighting for in Ireland. That is the real object of this Bill, but the educational reformer in Ulster is entirely new. The hon. Gentleman who introduced this Bill has delivered many speeches during the past twenty years in Belfast. Did he ever make a speech about education?

§ Mr. BROWN
Yes; on many occasions.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
Hon. Members coming into this House do not often suffer from an excess of modesty, and if they have any they soon lose it when they come here. The hon. Member is modest and he thinks that he has been of no importance in the past twenty years. Of course, he has always been important, and what it comes to is this, that while he has spoken on education he has never delivered a speech which the newspapers would report.

§ Mr. BROWN
made a remark which was not audible in the Reporters' Gallery.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
The hon. Member says he delivered education speeches but that they were not reported. That is a very serious reflection on the editor of the "Belfast Evening Telegraph" and on the editor of the "Belfast Northern Wing." They have treated the hon. Member unfairly in not reporting his important educational speeches. If they had reported them the matter might have been brought forward long ago. We now understand that one of the Ulster Unionist Members has made speeches on education which were never reported, but the other Ulster Unionist Members have not made education speeches before today. I leave it at that. The hon. Member who spoke last said that we want to leave education exactly whore we find it to-day. He is entirely mistaken in that as he was in every other statement he made. We do not want to leave education where it is to-day, but what we are 1283 not prepared to do is to accept a settlement of education on the lines which are proposed in the Bill now before the House. A report was presented recently by the Viceregal Committee which has inquired into education in Ireland. It is a very interesting document. It reviews the whole subject of primary education in Ireland, and is a very excellent Report. The highest tribute I can pay to it is to say that the speeches of the right hon. Member for Duncairn (Sir E. Carson) were extracted from it, and a good many of the speeches to which we have listened to-day received their inspiration from the same interesting document. This Report proposes a settlement for the whole of Ireland upon lines that would be acceptable to the whole of Ireland. What is the attitude of the hon. Members for Ulster? They say, "That is not good enough for us; we do not want one settlement which will satisfy the whole of Ireland. We want a special scheme for the city of Belfast. We want a scheme which we can work in Belfast instead of pressing the Government to give effect to the recommendations of the Viceregal Committee for the whole country."
I ask the House with every confidence to say that piecemeal legislation on the basis of partitioning one city from the rest of Ireland, and giving legislation for that which is not offered to the rest of the country, is not a method of legislation which ought to be encouraged in this House. The system is entirely wrong. This Debate will be a very good advertisement for the Members for the city of Belfast. Let them have the advertisement. We do not begrudge it, and I am sure the House will not begrudge it. But it is a gross waste of Parliamentary time.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
If it passes it we will kill it in Committee.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
The Bill has not a chance of getting on the Statute Book.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Not a ghost of a chance.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
Therefore I regard this Debate to-day as a sheer and gross waste of public time. We are told by the Government again and again that we cannot do this or that because of the shortness of Parliamentary time, and we have had Grand Committees set up to which Bills have been transferred from the consideration of this House in order to 1284 expedite the transaction of public business. Here we are at a very important period of the Session wasting a whole day upon a Bill which every man in this House knows has not got a dog's chance of reaching the Statute Book.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
The hon. Member for South Hackney (Mr. Bottomley) is waiting for his Bill.

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
We might let the Ulster Unionist Members—after all they are not the Ulster Members, they are only the Members for the North-east quarter of Ulster—enjoy their advertisement to the full, but the House should reject the Bill, which is based upon the unsound principle of legislation for one city instead of the whole country in the matter of education, and should reject it also on its merits that the Belfast Corporation is not a body which on its record is fit to be entrusted with the guardianship of the interests of the Catholic community.

§ Sir E. CARSON
I will attempt to bring the sense of the House back to the seriousness of the question we have to discuss, entirely disregarding the personalities, the misrepresentations and the buffoonery of the hon. Member who has just sat down. It is all very well for us to be amused here and for us to enjoy the Irish wit and good humour of the hon. Member—

§ Mr. MacVEAGH
We do not get much from you.

§ Sir E. CARSON
While it is an admitted fact that day by day 15,000 children of the labouring classes, as they are called, in Belfast, are not provided with any school or any teaching which will enable them to be brought up as proper citizens of this Empire. I do not know why hon. Members opposite bring themselves to adopt such an attitude. I could understand them bringing forward an alternative scheme. I could understand them making practical proposals and saying that we ought not to have this state of affairs in Belfast.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I did.

§ Sir E. CARSON
Allow me to go forward.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
You challenged me.

§ Sir E. CARSON
The attitude of hon. Members opposite is one of unflinching bigotry from beginning to end. The sole thing they put forward is that they say 1285 that that horrible place Belfast happens to have a great majority of Protestants, and because they have a great majority of Protestants they ought not to have the same facilities for education as are given in every other city of the United Kingdom. If I was making political capital out of this I would make this one observation, that when we are considering, as some day we shall, a settlement of the Irish question, what chance do you think we would have in Ireland of getting a single move on in the education of a Protestant child if we were under a majority of gentleman like hon. Members opposite? I pass from that and I say that this Bill is brought forward to try to relieve us from a shocking grievance and a scandalous state of affairs as regards the education of the children of the men who are working in your shipyards and your linen factories in Belfast. It is brought forward by a Labour Member, a trade unionist, upon behalf of those children, and I claim the sympathy of the House for it. It is said, why should you bring it forward for Belfast?

§ Mr. SEXTON
Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us whether the trade unionists of Ireland have adopted the principle of this Bill?

§ Sir E. CARSON
I say that it is put forward by a trade unionist. Does the hon. Gentleman contradict that statement?

§ Mr. SEXTON
No.

§ Sir E. CARSON
Then do not interrupt me.

§ Mr. SEXTON
Has this been approved by organised labour in Ireland?

§ Mr. SPEAKER
The hon. Member is not entitled to interrupt.

§ Sir E. CARSON
I have not interrupted anybody. I have listened throughout this Debate, and although I have been called all sorts of names, as is the custom, I have not minded it one bit. Everybody should give and take in a discussion of this kind, even if it is about Ireland. Why do we bring forward this matter with regard to Belfast? We do not see the slightest probability of a Bill for the whole of Ireland. Are we to go on waiting for ever? Can this House, as the custodians of the rights and the liberties of these people in Belfast, rest satisfied when it is met with the fact that to-day there are 1286 15,000 children who never go to school in Belfast, who want to go to school—[HON. MEMBER: "Shame"]—and there are 11,000 in schools which the sanitary authorities have condemned, which they say ought to be shut up? Surely, when we are told that we are wasting a day in discussing a question of this kind, that ought to show the House the kind of feeling that underlies the opposition to this Bill. Belfast contains one-tenth of the whole population of Ireland, and I may say the most progressive part. Not only that but Belfast, I regret to say, is one of the few places that go on increasing in population in Ireland. It adds something like 5,000 to 6,000 a year. That is the real reason why this condition of affairs has sprung up in Belfast. How long are we going to perpetuate that, and going to allow an annual increase of 5,000, and a similar proportion of decrease in accommodation in schools?
Belfast for the first time is represented in this House in its proper proportion to the numbers of its population. At the last election for the first time Belfast got the increased, representation to which it was entitled, and out of ten members allotted to it by the Franchise Act, nine have come here, and are here to-day demanding this for Belfast, and they would not have been doing their duty if they had not brought forward the case for this Bill. We have had year after year reports of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, and of their inspectors, drawing attention to the condition of affairs in Belfast. Here is an extract from the last Report, for 1913–14, before the War: The need for suitable school accommodation is so great that, in the absence of a school rate or of organised effort, it is hopeless to expect that individual effort on the part of managers will ever be competent to deal with the difficulty. We come here on that Report, and the crime we commit is we say that this state of affairs exists, which is not contradicted. I think the hon. Member for the Falls Division said himself that it was a scandal. All we ask to-day is that you should do for us what you have done for England and Scotland—enable us to rate ourselves. We are willing to pay. That is the only issue, and the whole issue, that is before the House to-day, and that is being opposed by the hon. Members opposite.
The truth of the matter is that the treatment of Ireland in regard to education is a great public scandal, and is felt nowhere more than in Belfast. Last year 1287 there were passed two Bills, one for England and one for Scotland, and the Prime Minister made a speech in which he said that those Bills were the charter for every boy in England and Scotland of having the opportunity of climbing from the lowest rung of the ladder in the most humble circumstances, through co-ordination, to the very highest position that is to be obtained. Not only was that legislation not passed for Ireland, but the legislation of seventeen or eighteen years ago, putting education on the rates, has never yet been introduced into Ireland. Ireland has never been given the chance which that Bill gave to all your children in England, and this is the first effort that has been made to try to put our children in Ireland upon something like the same status as the children in England and Scotland, and we are met, instead of with a friendly attempt to make some arrangement, with scoffs and jeers, and the kind of speech to which we have just listened. It means that you are asked to say by your votes that the Irish child must continue to keep a back seat, and not have the same chance as the child in England and Scotland in facing the difficulties of life in this United Kingdom. So far as I am concerned, I will go on and on, notwithstanding the jeers of hon. Gentlemen opposite, until some settlement of this matter is obtained from the Government.
We, at all events, have done our best, and after a great deal of trouble have brought in what I believe to be an excellent Bill, which does nothing more than to incorporate the English and Scottish status in the education system of Ireland. How has this Bill been brought about? The hon. Gentleman who has just addressed the House says, of course, "The Member for Duncairn, who has played a wily part"—a sort of hidden hand—and that "he wants to draw a red herring across the trail of Home Rule." The whole of that is a fiction of the hon. Member. There is a crying need, and has been in Belfast for many years, as the hon. Member would know if he had followed the evidence, or had followed the Reports of the inspectors, and the Reports of Mr. Dale, and various other experts, who have been sent over from time to time to investigate this matter. "Oh! but," said the hon. Member, "the corporation had something to do with it." That is a dreadful thing. Just imagine a corporation daring to take up the question of the 1288 education of the city in which they are a corporation! What an outrage on democratic government! Then there was the chamber of commerce. "Just imagine," says the hon. Gentleman, "an out-of-date thing like the chamber of commerce daring to interfere or taking an interest in education!" The Belfast Corporation appointed a committee last October on this resolution: That having considered the need for reform in primary education, which is of great national importance, this Committee suggests to the council the desirability of appointing a special committee, to consider and report from time to time on the question on all its aspects. Just fancy a corporation daring to do that. The corporation having done that, invited members of all creeds to join the committee, and many did join the committee. Upon that committee were Dr. D'Arcy, the Bishop of the Episcopalian Church, and the Moderator of the General Assembly, and representatives of the Methodist body. I know that the Roman Catholic hierachy were also invited, and I believe they attended from time to time, and I believe great efforts were made to come to an agreement. But if people try to hold aloof, or if by holding aloof they think they can make a grievance because they are not present, I do not think this House ought to listen to that for a moment. There was some reference today to the controversies that existed here between the Nonconformists and Church, people when the Education Bill was being considered. I remember them well. I lived through them and I am glad to say I outlived them. There is nothing of that kind in Belfast at all events. All the Protestant Churches, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational whatever they are, are all absolutely convinced that the scandal which exists at present ought to be put an end to. We are really met by the old argument that we have heard so often, that you ought not to do anything which will interfere with the particular schools of one particular religion. Let me be perfectly frank about this. So far as I am concerned, and I said it before in this House on the one Debate we had on Ireland this Session, I say this, that rather than keep these children, whether they belong to my own faith or to the faith of hon. Gentlemen opposite, deprived of the same advantages which are being given in England and Scotland and kept back in the race, I am prepared to make any 1289 terms with the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the Roman Catholic citizens of Belfast. I said so over and over again. I do not want to do them any injury. The hon. Member for Falls who represents one of the divisions of Belfast, seemed to think that we wanted in some way or other to interfere with the Roman Catholic schools. We do not want to do anything of the kind, and I will show in a moment that by this Bill we do not do so. But the hon. Gentleman is quite right if he says that, so far as the schools that come under this Bill are concerned, we object to the managerial system. I most emphatically say here, it is the worst system that was ever attempted to be foisted on the people, I tell the hon. Gentleman this much more, that it is not merely from schools of my own faith that I get many letters. If he inquires, he will find that the teachers of his own religion are up in arms against the managerial system, and I do not wonder at that, because the clergyman, whatever he may be or of whatever faith he may be, takes upon himself the arbitrary power and keeps dismissing and appointing at his own sweet will. The teachers have not the slightest chance of any appeal to anybody to get justice in these matters. I had a letter the other day—I do not remember the exact figures—where one manager of a school in a comparatively short time had dismissed thirty-seven teachers. That ought to be put an end to, but, if you like to keep it on in your own schools, keep it on, but let us have this system, the same system as that which prevails in England and in Scotland. I want to say now what the Bill is. The Bill sets up the corporation as the educational authority. If you do not want to have the corporation, take some other body, but let us get on. The corporation are to appoint a committee to carry out the administration of education. It is to consist of a representative of each municipal ward in the city of Belfast to be selected annually, and a representative, or representatives of parents, and a representative, or representatives, of teachers engaged in the schools under the control of the education authority, and a representative, or representatives, of persons concerned in the management of schools. A fairer body I cannot imagine, or a more up-to-date body to carry out the administration of a Bill of this kind.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I do not like to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, but did he hear my recital of the facts as to the appointment of teachers?

§ Sir E. CARSON
I do not know what that has got to do with this Bill. That is not the corporation nor the management committee under this Bill.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
It is a Committee appointed by the Belfast Corporation.

§ Sir E. CARSON
It has nothing whatever to do with this Bill. There is no such body as is proposed to be set up by this Bill. Therefore I do not think the cage brought forward has got anything to do with this Bill. Let us see how far the Bill is really unfair towards any religious denomination. Of course, in everything connected with Ireland religion is always dragged in. Why should I wish to be unfair on this question of religious education? I know perfectly well if this Bill passes, it will not be long before it will be called for throughout the rest of Ireland, where my own co-religionists are in a minority. Therefore there is no one more anxious that minorities should be properly protected than I am. What protection does this Bill give to a minority or to a denomination, or to anybody? In the first place, you need not bring your schools in under it at all. You come in voluntarily or you stay out. There is something more. If you come in voluntarily, you have the right to have religious teaching the same as heretofore in the schools, and you have the right to have particular parts of the schools set apart at hours, to be settled if necessary by the Commisioners of Education, for giving instruction in religious teaching. Is that unfair? Is that taking away anything? Not only that, but the Bill goes on to say, if you wish to keep your schools and to remain outside the control of the corporation, even under those circumstances, subject to proper inspection by the Commissioners, not the corporation at all, they are bound to contribute whatever is necessary out of the rate that is raised, even though you are not under the local control. Could anything be framed fairer or conceived fairer than that as regards an attempt to settle this question? But only let us get into Committee and commence to thresh it out and try and make a beginning, and, so far as I am concerned, I undetrake that I will do everything in my power to meet the wishes of hon. Gentle- 1291 men opposite in the hope that in the same way, when you come to apply educational measures to the South and West of Ireland, they will do the same to the minority there. If we go on merely bandying words, and saying, "You are a bigot" and "You are another," we will go on doing it to the end of time, and meanwhile the children will go wandering about the streets, learning nothing but what is bad, and having no opportunity of getting on and progressing in the same way as children in England and Scotland. There is no use in arguing the matter in that way. This Bill has been framed with an honest attempt to do justice to all parties, one of the reasons being, as I have said, that it must eventually apply in the same way to the majorities and minorities which are reversed when you come to the South and West of Ireland.
I ask the Government this simple question, How long is this state of affairs to go on? Is there to be no provision or no attempt to ameliorate it? Are all these children to remain without help in their early years, without the help which I believe to be their absolute right in fitting them for the great fight which is before them? One more matter, and one only, do I care to deal with for the moment, and it is this. All sides are agreed that the treatment of the teachers is one that requires the most immediate attention of the Government. In this Bill we ask to take powers to pay the teachers properly out of the rates. If we are not going to be allowed to do that, what is the Government's proposal? The Viceregal Commission which has been referred to points out how badly the teachers are paid and treated. It requires no legislation to improve that, if you wish to do it, out of Treasury funds, and I do hope that my right hon. Friend to-day will tell us that we may have at all events on that one point an immediate announcement from the Government that they are going to put an end to that scandalous state of affairs. It is something like eighteen or nineteen years—I do not remember the number of years—since I first went to Mr. Gerald Balfour, when he was Chief Secretary for Ireland, and I told him over and over again and pressed upon him that the worst policy of successive Governments was to keep the teachers disgruntled, underpaid, and badly treated, with a burning sense of injustice and grievance, and to bring 1292 them in contact with the youth of the country, and train them under those circumstances and expect that they should grow up as citizens contented with the lot that was theirs. This matter has gone on far too long, and believe me, when we have all these controversies about a settlement of Ireland, whether it is to be Home Rule, whether it is to be a Republic, whether it is to be Federation, or all these different theories that are put forward—believe me that at the root of every one lies the system of education, and we need not defer a settlement of that until these other matters which have been in controversy for so many years are again raised. I earnestly hope that my right hon. Friend will get up and tell us that the Government are prepared to back this Bill and push this Bill, and not only this Bill, but to make this Bill, or something corresponding with it, applicable to the whole of Ireland, and I believe the Government will have done the best day's, work that has been done for that country for very many years past.

Mr. O'CONNOR
If the case for and against the Bill was correctly represented by the very powerful speech which the right hon. and learned Gentleman has just delivered, there would, I think, be few to go in to the Lobby against it, but I do not think the right hon. and learned Gentleman has quite accurately put the case before the House. I do not want to rub this in, but I must make the observation that the right hon. and learned Gentleman was singularly inaccurate, and I would go further and say ungrateful as an Irishman, in his statement that this was the first effort to deal with the educational problem in Ireland. Another hon. Gentleman who spoke said we were asking for Ireland what had been given to England forty-nine years ago. I have spent nearly forty of those forty-nine years in this House, and there is not a single Session during that long tale of forty, years when Members from these benches have not pressed upon the Government of the day—including Governments in which the right hon. and learned Gentleman was a powerful member, but not so far as Irish education was concerned; in so far as Irish education was concerned, he was eloquent but silent—there was not a single Session in all these many Sessions in that long tale of nearly forty years that either myself or some other hon. Member of the Irish party did not press upon the Government of the day the deficiency and the scandal of Irish 1293 education. In the very first Session I was in this House, in the year 1880, I brought forward a Debate on the kind of school books that we had in the so-called National schools in Ireland, in which an Irish child was asked to learn verses in which he thanked God that he was "a happy English child," and in which there were other strong appeals to national sentiment at that time. If you want to know the cradle of the discontent in Ireland which has taken such a violent form to-day, it will be found in the National schools of our country. An hon. Member referred to the report of Dr. Dale, but he did not refer to the fact that that report was brought forward by the members of my party and led to a strong Debate in this House. I remember one very significant Debate—and I do not remember the right hon. and learned Gentleman opposite taking part in it—which was initiated, I believe, by my late friend Lieutenant Kettle, who died so noble a death in the late War. In the course of that Debate he made a statement culled from one of the reports of Dr. Dale, or some other person, which was so shocking and so striking that it has remained in my memory ever since. He made the statement that in one of the schools in Ireland the space per child was less than the space in the Black Hole of Calcutta. I remember myself bringing before the attention of the House the fact that fuel was so sparsely given to the schools in Ireland that the children actually had to carry the sods of turf under their arm in going to the school in order to make the fire, and I must say that Satan rebuking a in was not a more edifying spectacle than these gentlemen, who have been silent about the wrongs of education in Ireland, now coming forward in their new-found ardour and reproaching us because we fought to get for Ireland the institutions and the liberty that would have destroyed all these grievances thirty years ago.
I must take up another observation of the right hon. and learned Gentleman. It was not his intention to be unfair, but I think it was grossly unfair. He said that the way hon. Members on these benches have received this Bill was an example of the way Ireland would be treated in the matter of education if Ireland had Home Rule. In the last speech made in this House by one of its most honourable members who died a few weeks afterwards, the Rev. Silvester Horne—and I do not think there could be any greater monu- 1294 ment to his sacred and honoured memory than that last speech—as an Englishman, on behalf of the liberties of Ireland, and, although the strongest of Protestants, on behalf of the liberties of Catholics, said that a spirit of intolerance and bigotry might be anything, but it was not Protestantism, and to the Protestantism of ascendancy and bigotry no one of broad mind would give anything but opposition. There is much common ground between the right hon. and learned Gentleman and myself. The educational conditions in Ireland are shocking. I think if he proceeded to the logical and inevitable conclusion of his own denunciations, he would be with us on these benches.

§ Sir E. CARSON
No, because I know nothing would ever be done.

Mr. O'CONNOR
This is something like a calumny upon his fellow-countrymen which, I hope, in cooler moments, the right hon. and learned Gentleman will regret. Have we never done anything for education? Was not our country the educator and the civiliser of Europe before Ireland was invaded, and its education destroyed by centuries of penal legislation? An hon. Friend says that it was Scotland that educated Europe. I am not going into history, but we lent them our aid, to which, with characteristic Scottish tenacity, they have stuck ever since. I would remind the hon. Member that Scotia was the name of Ireland before it was that of Scotland. But for the right hon. Gentleman to lay the indictment against his fellow countrymen that if education were entrusted to them nothing would be done is, I think, in the face of the history of Ireland, a calumny upon his countrymen which in his cooler moments he will regret.

§ Sir E. CARSON
I am quite as cool now as I will ever be.

Mr. O'CONNOR
I do not know that the right hon. Gentleman is ever cool when he discusses the question of Ireland. Take the Irishmen whom I especially represent in this House—the Irishmen of Great Britain. When they came broken and hungry from Ireland after the famine of 1846, most of them to Liverpool and St. Helens and other parts of Lancashire, the very first thing that they did, after building the chapel of their faith, was to give 1d., 2d., or 3d. a week in order to build their Catholic schools, and during three-quarters of a century the Catholic schools of England have been maintained out of 1295 the pence of the Irish poor. For the right hon. Gentleman now to bring such a charge against the Irish people and the Irish race, well, is anything more unfounded than is this charge that if they had control of their own affairs they would be indifferent to education? There is no one so devoted or more devoted to education in any country in the world than are the Irish. All these years we have been complaining from these benches, and been appealing, too, whilst hon. Members on the other benches have been silent. To-day there is a strange difference. We find the right hon. Gentleman speaking in the way he has, but it has not been until, like Saul going to Damascus, he has seen the vision—or perhaps it has been forced upon the right hon. and learned Gentleman? That, however, is not the point.
We admit that the state of education in Ireland is bad; not in Belfast only. We admit, and have constantly protested, that the payment of our teachers in Ireland was inadequate. I quite agree with the right hon. and learned Gentleman that the inadequacy of these salaries has created a discontented Intelligensia—as it is described in Russia, and as it exists in China, in Russia, and other parts of the world. And that crowd of ill-paid and inadequate members of the Intelligensia is, perhaps, one of the sources of the present discontent. Does anyone deny that the educational conditions of Belfast are bad, scandalous, and intolerable? It may be worse in the more crowded and populous parts, but the educational conditions of Ireland are bad everywhere. Therefore, it is not as to the condition of education in Ireland where the hon. Gentleman and we differ and that we take the view we do on the proposals of the Bill. It is as to the remedy. In the first place, I must note the astonishing fact that for the second time the proposal is made to start a Soviet in Belfast. Things move very rapidly in these days. We thought Soviets were confined to Russia, but we have two Soviets in Ireland, one in Belfast and another in Limerick. Now we are offered a third in Belfast. Has anybody in the history of legislation ever heard a proposal so remarkable as that a special Education Act should be passed for one city out of the entire nation? That is not the way to approach the education ques- 1296 tion. It ought to be approached as a whole, and not as a thing confined to a single city.
Let me see row we disagree as to the remedy of a state of things which we admit. As I understand it, the schools in Ireland can get a Grant of two-thirds of the expenditure in respect to the buildings if one-third of the expenditure is raised by voluntary subscriptions. As I understand it—there has been some controversy about it—the Catholics of Belfast have not, perhaps, adequately or completely—but to a very large extent out of their subscriptions—found that third which entitled them to the two-thirds from the State. The result is that there is—I do not know the exact figures—not a great shortage in the number of Catholic schools in Belfast. The schools are not quite satisfactory, but I put it to the House that when we are charged with indifference to education, and the people we represent in Belfast are charged with it, it is not compatible with the facts. The greatest shortage is in the schools which belong to the religion of the majority of that city, and it is not creditable to the generosity of the rich citizens of Belfast that they should show a poorer record in voluntary subscriptions to keep up their own schools than the record of their poorer citizens. That is an answer to the intolerable indictment made by the right hon. Gentleman that we are indifferent to education. The people we represent to-day in Belfast have proved their anxiety and zeal for education in the most emphatic and undeniable of all ways, by putting their hands into their pockets and keeping up their own schools, while their richer fellow-citizens in Belfast have kept their pockets closed.
I do not think hon. Members opposite ought to talk too much about the indifference of Catholics to education, while this indictment can be made against the generosity of the people of their own creed. The schools are bad, and they can only be made better by more money; but there are several ways of getting the money, and you can get it if you will subscribe one-third of the building Grant, for then you will get two-thirds from the State. [An Hon. Member: "No!"] I will not contest that point, but this is my information, and therefore you have a remedy immediately, and it is that you should be as generous to your schools as the Catholics. The right hon. and learned Gentleman made an offer to my hon. Friend the 1297 Member for the Falls Division (Mr. Devlin), and he said, "If we join together we can beat them all." I have always thought there was a little touch of anti-British prejudice deep down in the bottom of the heart of the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Duncairn (Sir E. Carson), and I thought I saw that deep feeling just showing its head above the top when he asked my hon. Friend to join with him in an attack upon the English enemy. Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman suppose that if he joined with us and went to the Treasury that we would not shame them into making this Grant? Let the right hon. and learned Gentleman join with us and vote against the Government. I do not know anybody who knows better how to intimidate governments than the right hon. and learned Gentleman. If he will do that, we will get the money from the Treasury, or try to do so. The argument of my hon. Friend the Member for the Falls Division was that the British Exchequer were imposing an additional £10,000,000 of taxation upon Ireland, and that we were perfectly within our rights in asking that some of that money should be given towards the education of our children. Is not that a fair demand? The right hon. and learned Gentleman, in a perfectly courteous interruption, said that was for whisky. That is begging the question. It is not really taxation upon distillers or publicans or even whisky drinkers in Ireland; it is taxation upon Ireland as an entity. I do not care whether it is drawn from whisky, or tea, or sugar, or land; it is taxation upon Ireland. Have we not a perfect right to ask that some of that enormous additional taxation should be given towards the relief of what the right hon. and learned Gentleman and I are perfectly agreed in thinking is a shocking scandal and peril to Belfast? I invite the co-operation of the right hon. and learned Gentleman.
The third solution is the solution of the State. I do not honestly think that a worse solution could be found. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman and those responsible for the Bill had put their heads together with a desire to arrive at a solution which would do the most good and create the least trouble they would not have chosen this solution. I do not want to raise the sectarian controversy. Everybody knows my opinion. I have expressed it so often that I am almost 1298 ashamed to repeat it. The spirit of sectarianism, though often employed in the defence of religion, is to my mind the very antithesis of the heart and soul of the Christian faith. Statements have been made as to the generous liberality of the corporation and other governing bodies of Belfast. I must say that I admire the courage with which this answer is made to the charge of intolerance among certain sections of the Protestant population in Belfast. My hon. Friend (Mr. Devlin) was to-day called a mediæval reactionary. He, if he is a reactionary, I do not know what "reactionary" means. A few years ago I read a statement in a paper that a school in a town in the North of Ireland had been boycotted for several days or weeks because the manager of the school, who, if I remember rightly, happened to be a Presbyterian clergyman, had employed as a teacher of needlework a young girl who happened to be a Catholic. Because this reverend gentleman was guilty of the atrocity of employing as a sewing teacher a Catholic girl, his school was boycotted, and the girl had to be dismissed. The right hon. and learned Gentleman committed himself to the statement that the education of Protestant children would not be safe in our hands. Why, there is scarcely a big Catholic school or college in the North of Ireland that has not a Protestant teacher on the staff. There are Protestant teachers at Black rock College, an intensely Catholic institution. At the National University there is a Protestant professor who is known and respected by all the old Members of this House, Mr. Swift MacNeill, and there are three or four more Protestant teachers. Tell me a Protestant school in Belfast or in Ulster where there is a Catholic teacher.

§ Mr. MOLES
Will the hon. Gentleman tell me whether they would be content to accept a position in a Protestant school?

Mr. O'CONNOR
I am afraid my hon. Friend, with all his great knowledge of education, has not yet become acquainted with the Catholic mind with reference to this question. To ask the Catholics of Ireland to put themselves under the control of a body like this is an intolerable and unacceptable demand. I know the theory has always been that no man's religion is ever asked in Belfast. But everybody knows it, especially the public boards. My hon. Friend once startled me by the statement, which I readily accepted as being absolutely true, that a Catholic 1299 in Belfast and the North of Ireland has about the same chance of social or political recognition as a coloured man has in the white States of South America. It is a terrible thing to say, but it is perfectly true. I feel it my duty to tell my countrymen opposite that if they are losing prestige and credit, if they are gradually becoming isolated from opinion in this country and this House, it is because they maintain that spirit of religious intolerance which, thank God, has disappeared from nearly all creeds in this country. You build your schools out of the money you get from Catholics as well as from Protestants. You build with that money schools worthy of the greatness and the architecture of your city. You build them out of the rates paid by Catholics, but no Catholic would ever be allowed to teach in those schools or to get any position in them, because we know how the spirit of the corporation would deal with them. That is the reason why we do not feel it would be safe to allow our people to go to them. I would join with every effort made for the children of Belfast, whether Protestant or Catholic. I know no such distinction in dealing with my fellow citizens. I will join in any effort to wring from the £10,000,000 additional taxation imposed on our country enough money to give our people all the schools they want in Belfast, but I cannot give my support to a Bill which is introducing into our controversies in Ireland an element that has never been introduced before.
I have heard Englishmen in the old bitter days of the education controversy in this country say, "Give us the splendid undenominational system they have in Ireland." The system in Ireland is more denominational than in any other country in the world, and it is denominational with the assent of all parties. One hon. Member in this Debate said that he wanted to see an undenominational system in Ireland. I beg to tell him that if he proposes that system he will find himself in splendid isolation in public opinion both of Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. We have kept this religious controversy out of our educational system so far. Let us, in heaven's name, keep it out still. I beg the House and the Government not to throw this new cause of discord into Irish life. If they will bring in a well-considered and national scheme, I am willing to give it a fair and thorough examina- 1300 tion. The proper place to decide this question is not on the floor of this House Look at the state of the House to-day. One hon. Member opposite said that all the Members for Belfast were here. I counted the Members in the House when this Bill was brought on. There were twenty-three Irish Members and twenty-three English and Scottish Members, and I do not believe there have been more in the course of this Debate. We have had an interesting and, on the whole, a good tempered Debate, and I have not said one word to excite the susceptibilities of hon. Members opposite. Twenty-three British Members have heard this Debate, but, when the Division comes, there may be 100 or 200 British Members who will take part in it. They have not heard a word of the Debate, yet that is the tribunal which you are prepared to prefer to a tribunal on the soil of your own country.

§ The ATTORNEY-GENERAL for IRELAND (Mr. Samuels)
We have had a very valuable Debate, and not the least, valuable of the utterances we have heard, are those which have come from the hon. Member for the Scotland Division of Liverpool (Mr. T. P. O'Connor), from the hon. Member for the, Falls Division (Mr. Devlin), and from the hon. Member for East Donegal (Mr. Kelly), who said that, they were prepared to join in a real effort for the settlement of this almost secular question of Irish education. We have had to-day a true account—and I think it has been a true account from both sides—of the condition of affairs in Belfast in relation to education and the want of education, and the impossibility of education there, and Belfast is only a microcosm of the rest of Ireland. I am not speaking of Belfast from outsider knowledge as regards this matter of education. I am Chancellor of the Diocese in which that great city is situated, and I have from time to time considered it my duty, before I had a seat in this House, to look into matters connected with Irish, education and the Reports of the Commissioners, year after year, drawing attention to the desperate condition of the Belfast suburbs. Therefore, I do not wonder that the great city of Belfast, whether by its Corporation, by its Chamber of Commerce, or by its public-spirited citizens, has found it necessary to make some great effort to bring forward a scheme which should be applied to it if the rest of Ireland is not going to be dealt with. I hope the rest of Ireland is going to be dealt 1301 with, and speedily. The want in Belfast must grow, because Belfast is growing. As well as I know the statistics relating to the matter, the population of Belfast is now approaching something very like 370,000 at the last census. In addition to this, owing to the great growth of the industries in Belfast, a great demand for the increasing population is called for. I believe employment is open for 10,000 more men in shipyards. Men and women will go to Belfast and will bring their children with them, and it will be a necessity not only for the Protestants but for the Catholics of Belfast to undertake great educational obligations, far greater than those that are presented at this moment.
I think this is an admirably framed Bill, and the draughtsman, whoever he was, deserves every compliment for the way it is drawn. It is largely framed upon the Scottish and the English measures which have passed into Acts. It is an honest attempt to apply to the great problems of Belfast the views of educationists in Belfast. The unfortunate matter of the whole position is that that very important section of the population represented by my hon. Friends opposite were not joined in this effort for one reason or another. Attempts have been made to satisfy their aspirations by my hon. Friends, but it is not the same thing as if they had joined themselves, for, if we had a Belfast Bill, I should hope it would at once apply to the whole of Ireland, as far as primary education is concerned. I think the Bill is extremely valuable in many of its suggestions. What does it deal with? It only deals with primary education, and only with the primary education of Belfast. That is not the whole of the Belfast problem. The Belfast problem, as well as the problem of the rest of Ireland, is to link up the primary and secondary schools, to have continuation schools, and, what is almost more wanted, there than anywhere else, a great increase in technical education. Everybody knows the splendid technical schools of Belfast; but they are too cramped for the expanding intellectuality of the youth of Belfast and the great opportunities which are open to them.

§ Sir E. CARSON
They provide for several hundred students.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Is the right hon. Gentleman speaking for the Government? Will he tell us what the Government is going to do?

§ Mr. SAMUELS
The technical education of Belfast is not linked up in this Bill, nor is the secondary education; and technical education in the rest of Ireland is also required to be linked up with secondary education and continuation schools and primary education. The position of the Government in regard to this matter is that at this moment my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary has appointed a Committee, and this Committee will meet next week and will begin to frame a great educational measure which, will be applicable, to the whole of Ireland. For the information of the House I will give the names of the gentlemen, every one of whom is a great expert on education, who will be dealing with this matter. They are as follows:
Mr. G. W. Alexander, Assistant Secretary of the Scottish Education Department—a gentleman of the very highest educational experience and attainments, who was examined before each of the Viceregal Commissions that recently sat in Ireland, namely, that presided over by Lord Killanin and that presided over by the Lord Chief Justice, and whose evidence, as everyone who has read the reports will agree, was of the highest value and assistance. He is also thoroughly acquainted with the Scottish educational system.
Mr. P. A. Barnett, late Inspector of the Board of Education—

§ Mr. DEVLIN
He is from England. Is there anybody from Timbuctoo?

§ Mr. SAMUELS
I do hope my hon. Friends will not take that attitude. Mr. Barnett, as I am assured by my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Education, is one of their most brilliant experts in matters of education, and he is going to give us his help in framing this measure. Then there is
Mr. W. F. Butler, M.A., Assistant Commissioner of Intermediate Education in. Ireland—a gentleman of the greatest experience, ability and knowledge in relation to matters of this kind;
Mr. George Fletcher, F.G.S., who has presided, with great ability and with great benefit to Irish interests, over the technical education side of the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction;
Mr. A. N. Bonaparte Wyse, M.A.—

§ Mr. DEVLIN
On a point of Order. The right hon. Gentleman has read the 1303 nationality of all the Commissioners who are to inquire into education in Ireland except one, whose nationality I demand to know. Every country in the world is represented on that Committee but Ireland. Where does Mr. Fletcher come from?

§ Mr. SPEAKER
The hon. Member seems to think he has a monopoly of the time of the House. He really must allow somebody else to speak besides himself. He made a long speech to-day, and in addition has interrupted some five-and-twenty times.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I put a perfectly relevant question.

§ Mr. SPEAKER
That question in itself is an interruption that is not permitted. While a Member is speaking he has the floor of the House, and he is entitled to speak and is not bound to give way to anybody.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
I did not ask him to give way. I addressed you, Sir, on a point of Order.

§ Mr. SPEAKER
There is no point of Order.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
With all due respect, there is a point of Order.

§ Mr. SPEAKER
There was no point of Order arising at all.

§ Mr. DEVLIN
The point of Order that I raised was this: The right hon. Gentleman the Attorney-General is reading out a list of gentlemen who are to be appointed for the purpose of considering the question of education in Ireland. He gave the nationality of every member he named, but when he came to one, Mr. Fletcher, he did not give the nationality. I asked him what it is. I do not think, with all respect, that that was an irrelevant or unimportant interruption.

§ Mr. SPEAKER
I have no control over what a Minister says. He can give the nationality or not, just as he pleases.

§ Mr. SAMUELS
I should have thought my hon. Friend would be sufficiently acquainted with Ireland and Irish affairs to know who Mr. Fletcher is. I thought it was superfluous for me to say who he is. He is one of the most eminent experts in secondary education in Ireland and has done his duty in a magnificent way. There is also Mr. Bonaparte Wyse, Secretary of 1304 the Board of National Education in Ireland. I suppose he is known to everybody in Ireland. These are the gentlemen who will next week sit down and frame a measure which my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary hopes to introduce at an early date, to deal with this great subject of Irish education. No formal terms of reference will be given to them at all. They are free to assist the Government in drawing up a great measure. I would appeal to my hon. Friends on both sides when this measure is framed, to give us their assistance so that we may come to a settlement of this question and their religious tenets and wishes may be safe guarded. We are not going to deal with this question in a very narrow spirit. We want to deal with it in a broad spirit, and to recognise the facts, and one of the great facts in Ireland is that the religious views and tenets of the people must be safeguarded in every possible way in any scheme. We shall, I hope, have an opportunity of introducing the Bill at an early date. My hon. Friend (Mr. Devlin) has said that a large body of people in Ireland surfers by the absence of a large number of Members. I must say that the hon. Member and those who are associated with him, who represent a very large proportion of the inhabitants of Ireland have not allowed the fact that there are a large number of representatives absent from this House to affect the interests of Ireland in other matters. I would appeal to the hon. Member, who has a good deal of constructive power, and those who are associated with him, to help us. The right hon. Gentleman (Sir E. Carson) said that he did not interrupt the hon. Member for the Falls Division. He did. He made one interruption. He said, "Join with me, and we will beat them all." I say to him let us all join together with the Government—

§ Mr. DEVLIN
Not at all.

§ Mr. SAMUELS
So that we can have a great measure to perfect our educational system. My hon. Friend the Member for the Scotland Division has said, "Go for the Treasury." Quite right. The Treasury must assist in this matter. But remember you will have to see if we can work together not only to get money, but to see also that our people will contribute to the upkeep, maintenance, and building of our schools. We have in both of these most valuable Reports suggestions as to methods, and 1305 when we see the great growth of the English and Scottish Estimates we must recollect that the reason why our Estimates are not growing in similar proportion is that the growth represents the poundage given by the Treasury on each pound of the local rates. When we begin to rate ourselves we will also be entitled to get these money Grants. Surely, it is not beyond possibility that Irishmen in a matter like this, while preserving our religious views and safeguarding our religious teaching in every way, shall meet together on common ground and build up a common system of education which will help us along. In that we will want the assistance of all sides. We will want their good will, and we will want their suggestions and I hope we shall have them. I hope that you will see this Bill soon, and meantime I would ask my hon. Friends on these benches, who have introduced this Bill, to allow it to stand adjourned. I shall undertake that this Bill shall be submitted for the consideration of this Committee that is dealing with the matter of education, along with those two Reports which will be largely the superstructure on which I hope to base this great educational measure, and it will receive the fullest consideration I have no doubt. But I would ask also for constructive suggestion from my hon. Friends on the opposite benches, and all those with whom they associated, and they will receive equal and impartial consideration, and everything will be done by the Government which it can do to frame a measure that will satisfy our country, and give it the opening that it must have if our boys and girls are to be fitted to hold their own in the competition which they will have to meet in the future course of their lives all over the world, not alone in England and Scotland and in their native land.

§ Mr. E. KELLY
This mean and contemptible little Bill has suddenly assumed a back seat. The extraordinary announcement of the right hon. Gentleman the Attorney-General is one which I take the earliest opportunity of protesting against. He has just announced, in effect, that a Committee is to be set up to settle the whole thorny question of Irish education. This Committee consists of five bureaucrats. Of those five bureaucrats one is Scottish, two English, and the remainder Irish. They are to settle co-ordination between university and secondary schools, and 1306 between secondary, and technical schools and between technical schools and primary schools. There is no public representative or representative of the churches or universities or local authorities. The educational fortunes of Ireland, the greatest interest which exists in the country to-day, are to be handed over to a body of which the majority are bureaucrats who will learn of Irish problems only from the date on which they were appointed to that Committee. That is an appalling; statement and one which will be read with astonishment in every quarter of Ireland, and I have little doubt that hon. Gentlemen opposite were as astounded at it as we were on these benches. We were entitled, I think, in the course of the Attorney-General's observations to learn what has become of the Killanin Report and the Report on the Committee on Intermediate Education, ably presided over by the Lord Chief Justice.

§ Mr. SAMUELS
I said those Reports will be considered.

§ Mr. KELLY
Men of distinction spent considerable time in framing the recommendations of those Committees, and although able educationists are not included on the body which is now to be set up, and which is to be called upon to frame an omnibus Education Bill which is to purport to solve all the educational difficulties of the country. Why are some of those men who have proved by their Reports that they are men of experience on this subject, not included in the body to which it is intended to hand over the future of our children? We are entitled to ask and assume, in view of the announcement made by the Government, that the Reports of those two Committees are to be scrapped, and not even read by the Government, just as they did in the case of the Irish Convention. He would be a foolish public man in any walk in public life in Ireland, who would for the future consent to act on any Committee in Ireland, after the experience of the open insults which have been proffered by the Government to the gentlemen who gave time and labour to the educational Reports. We would also have liked to have heard from the right hon. Gentleman what are to be the powers of this Committee of bureaucrats? Are they to inquire into the whole question of Irish education, and to make alterations in the statistics under which the universities were called into existence, and what 1307 is to be the reference to them. Are they to make financial recommendations or to be empowered to make financial demands upon the Treasury, in respect not only of university but also intermediate technical and national education in the schools?
It being Five of the clock, the Debate stood adjourned. Debate to be resumed upon Friday next.