August
Catholic Education
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Of the grievances from which the Irish Catholic laity suffered, they appear to have felt none more acutely than the difficulty, under the existing laws, of obtaining a liberal education for their sons. During the reign of Elizabeth, this had also been complained of, but now that the English authority had extended itself over the whole island, the state of the case had become worse. Investigations were made, and schoolmasters who had not conformed to the State religion were ordered to close their schools, however efficient these might be. It is certain that, in this as in other matters, evasions were often practised with success.
The great schools which had long existed in many of the principal towns, as Waterford, Limerick, Galway and Kilkenny, continued to flourish. To what extent they were ” reformed ” it is °ften difficult to say ; certainly, amongst the men trained in them during the later sixteenth and the earlier seventeenth centuries, were found many steadfast champions of Catholicity. In these schools the classical languages, and especially Latin, were the chief subjects of instruction but, in several, Irish, the native tongue, was also cultivated.
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April
Above : Picture Of Henry Grattan
Mention has been made in a previous chapter of the general state of education amongst the masses of the Irish people, in the closing years of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth. Much was done by the efforts of private charity for the most needy, while even poor peasants strove to pay the ten shillings or pound a year charged by some humble instructor for teaching reading, writing, and the simple rules of arithmetic to their children. Under such as system it was, however, inevitable that very large numbers—in fact, the great majority of even the boys, and still more of the girls—received no literary education at all. No aid was given by the State to any educational institution (save the clerical seminary of Maynooth) to which a conscientious Catholic could send his sons or daughters. Such money as was granted went to schools whose avowed aim was to alter the religion of the children and instruct them in the doctrines of the Reformed Church. Of such establishments there were many. The best known were the Charter Schools, founded early in the eighteenth century. On them a very large amount of public money was lavished. They continued till 1827.
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