The Doom of Ascendancy

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 51, 21 December 1905, Page 1

The Doom of Ascendancy

Long years ago, John O'llagan, who had been a friend of the poet Thomas Davis in Trinity College, warned the ascendancy party in Ireland that their long, monopoly of the public loaves and fishc* was drawing to a close. And he told them ' That doomed among mankindMarked with the fatal "mark, are they Who will not know their place or day, But cling to phantoms pass'd away, And sow the barren wind.' The heaviest blow yet received by the party of power and pelf in Ireland has been the throwing open of many public position^ in the country to competitive examination. The marked superiority of the training in Catholic colleges and schools, and their overwhelming successes against their more richly endowed Protestant rivals in

open competition, have filled the Ascendancy with a foreboding that has time and again found a voice. A fewi weeks ago, for instance, at the Meath Anglican Synod, the Rev. Dr. White said :—: — ' Nearly every position in banks, railways, the Civil Service, etc., were now only to be obtained by competitive examination. They had their National Schools, but they should remember the wonderful work done by the magnificent system conducted by the Christian Brothers throughout the country. They should note the fact that out of 37 exhibitions gained in the Junior Grade under the Intermediate Board, 36 were won by pupils taught in the schools oi the Christian Biolheis. This fact spoke in thunder tones to their Protestant fellow-countrymen, and should make them active in the field of education if they were not to be simply the hewers of wood and drawers of water.' * There still remain, as private preserves; of the dominant creed, vast monopolies of public place and high influence, from which Patholics are almost as rigidly excluded as if they were Bashi-Bazouks or Hottentots. Belfast still remains the Mecca of Ascendancy. The motto of its Corporation is, ' No Papist need apply.' Not one of its officials belongs to the hated creed, and out of £12,331 10s Gd paid to them in salaries and ■wages, not so much as the worth of a brass pin goes to a Catholic . It is>, in all the circumstances of the country, instructive to see a prominent divine of the monopolist party rise in Synod and entreat his co-reli-gionists (as the Dublin ' Freeman ' puts it) ' to educate themselves, that they may compete on something like equal terms with the Catholics ' There probably never was a creed that so wasted its day and squandered its opportunities and misused its vast resources as the one that has so long been dominant in the Gicen Isle. ' Life's ever-shifting currents Brave men put forth to try, THEY wait beside the ebbing tide Till darkness finds them dry.' The favored creeds in Ireland hold to this hour a monopoly of the country's rich public educational endowments. Yet, educationally, they are content to sit and wait idly beside the ebbing tide, while their Catholic fellow-countrymen arc up and doing while it is called day. These — poor me\ cr} thing but /eal and encigy for the minds and souls and heaits ol youth — ha\e long maintained the educational supremacy o[ the country. 'And year by year that proud Ascendancy of cultivated and spiritualised intellect becomes more and moie o\erwhelnnng. If, against such odds, Catholics score such educational triumphs, what would they not do, given equalities of opportunity '