The National University of Ireland Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The National University of Ireland

It is a matter of notoriety amounting to a scandal that the Irish people, quick-witted, intelligent, and devoted to learn ing as they have always proved themselves, were for centuries unable to obtain in their own land the advantages of such higher education as a University confers. Not from the time of the dissolution of those great medieval monastic institutions, which had been the glory of western Christianity, the training ground of the scholars of Europe, until the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, did the State make an attempt to remedy, even in small part, so appalling a condition of affairs. In 1591 the University of Dublin was founded. It was a strictly Protestant institution, and, alike by its constitution and their own religious tenets, the vast majority of the people of Ireland were debarred from its portals. For a period of over 250 years this University, with its solitary college of Trinity, was the only University in Ireland. Maynooth Col lege was, it is true, founded by the Irish Parliament in 1795, and received an annual grant from the public funds, but as it was a purely ecclesiastical corporation, and none but those studying for the priesthood were entitled to admission to its student body, it cannot be described as in any sense a Uni versity in'the modern acceptance of that term.

The spectacle of some people, of whom but a fractional minority had access to the sole Irish University, thus deprived of advantages which every other branch of the Cau casian race was enjoying, so moved the government of the day that in 1845 three Colleges of University standing were established, having their sites respectively in Belfast, Cork, and Galway. These Colleges were thrown open to students in the academic year 1849-50, and were officially combined into one University, under the title of the Queen's University of Ireland. This institution was foredoomed to failure: The Bill, which, when passed, established the Colleges, was during the second reading debate described as a gigantic scheme of godless education, because the teaching of religion in any form was specifically prohibited. Such an idea, which is now more or less sanctioned, passively, if not actively, was in that day repellent to large numbers of all sections of Christians in the United Kingdom. The godless epithet stuck. The three Queen's Colleges were looked at askance by many non-catholics, and although two of them were situated in the most Catholic parts of Ireland, Catholics were forbidden by rescript of Pius IX from sending their sons there to be educated. The whole situation was therefore decidedly unsatisfactory.

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