UNIVERSITY EDUCATION, IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 60, 3 May 1873, Page 9

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION, IRELAND.

By this time everyone is acquainted with the details of the measure proposed by the English Government for the final settlement of the University Education question in Ireland. It will not be necessary, therefore, for us to do more than recall to mind its leading features and principles to enable us to discuss its merits. In Ins speech the Premier, on behalf of the Ministry, proposed to establish one great University in Ireland, and for this purpose to separate Dublin University from Trinity College, Dublin, and to suppress the godless Queen's University. This done, he would withdraw the theological faculty from Trinity College, Dublin, place it in separate buildings, to be provided by means of public funds, and endow it liberally. The affairs of the godless college, Galway, should be wound up, $md an end put to that, expensive farce. But the godless colleges of Belfast and Cork were to be maintained at the public expense, and affiliated to the Dublin "University. Trinity College should receive an endowment of L 50,000 a year, and remain as it is, provided it would abolish all religious tests, and degrade itself to the condition of a godless college. He proposed to affiliate the Magee Presbyterian College and the Catholic University, Dublin, to the Dublin University, but no endowment of any kind was to be provided for these. Unaided, relying solely on their private resources, they should compete with Trinity College and its fifty thousand a year, and the two godless colleges and their very large State endowments. This the English Government considered just and equitable ! The Dublin University was to be forbidden to teach modern history and moral philosophy as compulsory parts of its curriculum, in order to emoluments and degrees. It might, however, insist on these subjects in order to honors. Such, then, was the Government scheme, and under it everyone ws to be well provided for except the Catholics; that is, the Government would establish aud endow a University and colleges from which the nation in the midst of which they would be established should be excluded. Ireland is a Catholic nation, and objects, on conscientious grounds, to godle?s edu cation, and yet this is precisely the only kind of education the Government of England proposes to afford. Even the little religion (such as it is) that is at present taught in Trinity College should, according to this plan, be taught no more. For either this is meant, or there is no meaning in the removal of tests. The incapacity of England to govern Ireland receives

private property of five or six hundred thousand of the richest people of the country, calling themselves the Irish Church. That Irish Church Act is, in our mind, a disgraceful trick, and the opprobrium of modern legislation ; and here in this Bill — which, however, has been, for the present at least, rejected — it was proposed to legislate on the same tricky principle; and whilst pretending to abolish Protestant ascendancy and establish equality, in reality to perpetuate, by a well-devised plan, that ascendancy. When will English statesmen learn to be wise and just in reference to Ireland ?