plane, it dealt with divine reality. Antipathy towards the use of the Bible for religious instruction was doctrinal and pedagogical even though it commonly appeared sectarian.2
In Ireland during the 1820s religious education became extremely politicised. The Kildare Place Association (named for the Dublin address from which the scheme was run) funded a system of state-funded Protestant schools, which were accused by Catholics of engaging in aggressive proselytising. Such schools co-existed uneasily with a larger and rapidly expanding unfunded system of Catholic schools in a context where Catholics were highly mobilised and where Catholic Emancipation was imminent. In opposition to the Kildare Place Society, Catholic prelates and influential laymen established the Irish National Society for Promoting the Education for the Poor in 1821 to articulate Catholic grievances and to propose alternatives. In January 1826 the Irish Catholic Bishop drew up resolutions, backed by the Catholic Association, supporting a ‘Mixed Education’ school system. Their proposals endorsed the admission of Protestants and Catholics into the same schools ‘provided sufficient care be taken to protect the religion of the Roman Catholic children and furnish them with adequate means of religious instruction’. A Royal Commission had been established in 1824 to examine how existing schools worked and to come up with a viable alternative system.
A form issued by the Royal Commission to all parish priests and ministers in Ireland during the summer of 1824 asked these to enumerate every book and printed paper of every description, which was or had been taught or in any way used, either for amusement or instruction, within School during the previous six months. In cases where Scriptures were used, respondents were asked to state whether it was the Bible at large or the New Testament alone; whether the translation used was that of the Established Church (the King James Bible) or the Catholic Douay Version. 1824 returns from Catholic schools, as analysed by Rev. Martin Brenan, then Professor of Education at St Patrick’s College Maynooth, were published as Schools of Kildare and Leighlin in 1935. Catholic religious instruction comprised, according to Brenan, ‘systematic grounding in the truths of faith as set forth in the catechism, as well as acquaintance with the recognised authorities on the ascetical and spiritual life’. The Commissioners took inventories of the content of parish libraries, reporting that these held between 89 and 280 religious books. The parish priest of Dunleckny wrote a letter to the Commissioners expressing his hope that, having examined his books and Catechisms, they were satisfied as to ‘the falsehood of the many charges brought by persons of other religions against the Catholic Clergy, and particularly that of their anxiety to keep the people in ignorance’.3
In 1826 in the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin just under 37,000 Catholic children were able to attend school, about half the total. The Commission identified the existence of many small private pay schools, the so-called ‘Hedge’ schools, in each parish. Reports collated by the Royal Commission gave tantalising glimpses of how such Hedge Schools were established and run. Fr Edward Earl the local parish priest described one such school in Killkeaskin:
Margaret Cooly. Opened School Herself. Roman Catholic; is 80 years or more; teaches Reading and Sewing; was taught in Dublin. Salary about £3 per year; rates 1.s.8d. per quarter. Has no fixed school-house; lives in an out-office at Killkeaskin where she teaches. Books – Primer, Reading Made Easy, Spelling Book, Butler’s Catechism.
Another better-off school, where the teacher Patrick Moore charged a shilling more per pupil per quarter, described a schoolroom built of lime and stone and thatched with straw, part of a house 14 feet in length with more than 50 pupils, with seats belonging to the Church. Moore had formal qualifications and a better library that, unusually, included both Protestant and Catholic texts. As listed by Fr Earl:
Books – Primer, Reading Made Easy, Child’s New Play Thing, Universal Spelling Book, The Deserted Child, Travels at Home, Gough’s and Voster’s Arithmetic, 4 Protestant Testaments, 1 Douay Testament, all New Testaments, Butler’s Catechism, The Church Catechism. The master said he bought the Douay Testament to compare it with the Protestant Testament; I told him to send it home; he did so. The Protestant Testaments were all given originally by the Protestant Ministers.
In ordering Moore to get rid of his Douay Bible, Fr Earl was doing no more than what Catholic clergy had done for centuries, insisting that the interpretation of Scripture was not the business of laypeople.
The Royal Commission’s 1826 proposals required that the master of each school in which the majority of pupils profess the Roman Catholic faith, ‘be a Roman Catholic and that, in schools in which the Roman Catholic children form only a minority, a permanent Roman Catholic assistant be employed’. These proposals were worked into a bill by Thomas Wyse, a Catholic Association MP. This bill was subsequently reworked by E.G. Stanley, the chief Secretary for Ireland in consultation with Lord Grey’s Whig government. A petition on educational reform from the Irish Catholic Hierarchy was presented to both Houses of Parliament in 1830.
The Catholic Church initially supported the system but became increasingly ambivalent to it over time. Presbyterians clamoured for a return of the old system. In 1832 the Synod of Ulster raised the cry of ‘the bible unabridged and unmutilated’ and held back from the board’s schools. The appearance of neutrality was crucial in managing demands for control from both sides. Under the leadership of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Daniel Murray and his Church of Ireland equivalent Richard Whately, the compromise brokered in 1830 survived for two decades. Some Catholic leaders, notably Archbishop McHale of Tuam, campaigned for a system of Catholic denominational schools and stepped up their demands over time. In 1839, to counter such demands, Murray requested that a legate be sent from Rome to evaluate the system. An evaluation was conducted the following year by the future Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Paul Cullen who concluded at the time that the schools ‘could not have been more Catholic than they are’.4 Even before the Devotional Revolution and the cementing of Catholic power usually attributed to Cullen, the widespread use of catechisms by lay teachers helped make this possible.
BF
Notes
1Michael Tynan, Catholic Instruction in Ireland 1720–1950 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1985).
2Various catechisms in the holdings of the Catholic Library in Dublin are cited.
3Rev. Martin Brenan, Schools of Kildare and Leighlin 1775–1835 (Dublin: MH Gill and Sons, 1935).
4Peadar McSuibhne, Paul Cullen and his Contemporaries, vol. 4, (Kildare, Leinster Leader, 1974), p.8.
6
William Theobald Wolfe Tone (ed.), The Autobiography of Wolfe Tone (1826)
The stature of Wolfe Tone (1763–1798) in the canon of Irish nationalism owes much to the posthumous publication of his autobiographical writings and diaries almost two decades after his death. A few of Tone’s pamphlets had an immediate impact during his life, particularly An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, published in 1791. After his death Tone’s reputation was overshadowed by those of other contemporaries, notably Lord Edward Fitzgerald. It was not until the 1840s, with impatience with Daniel O’Connell’s constitutionalism running high amongst Young Ireland nationalists, that Tone was first canonised as the great patriot of 1798. Patrick Pearse declared Tone’s Autobiography to be the first Gospel of the New Testament of Irish nationalism more than a century after Tone’s death. Tone’s grave became the topic of a ballad by Thomas Davis (Bodenstown Churchyard) and was described as the holiest place in Ireland by Pearse at an oration there in June 1913. Since then Sinn Fein and the IRA have held annual commemorations of Pearse’s performance