ABOLITION OF AN IRISH UNIVERSITY

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1077, 23 May 1882, Page 4

ABOLITION OF AN IRISH UNIVERSITY

The Queen’s University in Ireland has been dissolved, in Conformity with the provisions of an act of Parliament passed in 1879 for the establishment of a University of Ireland. In 185-1 when Irish education was the prominent topic of the day, it was said, give the Irish people the opportunity ofaquiring information untainted at its source by theological prejudice; let them learn history and philosophy ■ they really are, and not as they are presented to them in Roman Catholic text-books, and their eyes will be opened, and half the difficulties of the Irish question will be solved at once. ■Unfortunately, however, these sanguine ■expectations was very far from being fulfilled. It was not found that the Roman Catholic youth of Ireland availed themselves of the opportunity afforded to the extent that was desired andyearafter year .it became clearer that something more was still necessary. Trinity College, Dublin, was thrown open to all denominations, and thus there were two universities in Ireland totally free from all religious restrictions, and open to the whole people. But there was one point in which they differed from our own university Loudon ; and it was here that the «hoe pinched. Trinity College, Dublin, would only confer degrees on studieuts who had been resident, or had come up to Dublin to undergo periodical examination. The Queens’s U uiversity, incorporated in 1850, would one confer degrees on students who had resided in one of the three Qaeeii’s Colleges. Thus, either residence in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, or Galway, or else submission to regular examinations at Trinity College, were the conditions, without which no university degree could be obtained in Ireland. The system, though it has disappointed the expectations of its authors, has, nevertheless, worked better than its enemies have asserted. The Roman Catholics havenot helpenti • y aloof from either Trinity or Queens Colleges. Three years ago a.fourth of the whole number of members of the Queen’s University were Roman Catholics. But this was not enough to justify the system. It was found that Roman Catholic familes, on the whole were reluctant to allow their sons to reside in these colleges, and to receive a nonreligous education in the society of young men whom their religion taught them to regard as heretics. The University has not educated the Irish middle classes, of Roman Catholic, on a large scale, and therefore another plan has to be tried.