FROM THE ARCHIVES:The Free State minister for education, Eoin MacNeill (or John MacNeill, as The Irish Timespersisted in calling him), gave a robust defence of his compulsory Irish policy in a speech in his Clare constituency. – JOE JOYCE
HE WAS told he was wasting time and public money on the teaching of Irish. It was the Irish language, feeble as it was – and he defied contradiction on the point – that had brought them out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage.
And now, he continued, because perhaps we have to wander for a few years in the desert, we have certain people here and there – some who used formerly to be called Nationalists and some who used to be called Unionists – who want us to turn our backs on our principles, and on our ideals, and to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt. Well, I am not going to do it, and if you want a representative to represent you in that way I will make way willingly for another man.
That morning he had read in a newspaper a letter from a colleague in the Dáil –Mr. Patrick McKenna – who referred to a waste of money on a pretence of teaching Irish. Who is pretending to teach Irish? asked Mr. MacNeill. Is it a pretence on my part? Is it a pretence on the part of my officials? Is it a pretence on the part of the teachers? There is no pretence about it. We are in earnest.
Mr. McKenna, he said, held up Denmark as an example for them, and he was content to accept the comparison. In Denmark the people began the sort of education that the wiseacres were denouncing in Ireland.
The Danish language, history, folklore and traditions were the groundwork of their system of education, and the basis on which they had built up a successful country. In Ireland, they were told, they ought to be providing an education that would give a billet here and there to little Tom, Dick and Harry. If that was the aim of the wiseacres, it was not his aim. In his view, education should be for the benefit of the community and not to provide situations for this and that person. Most of the youngsters who had got that kind of education were not going to live in Clare or in Ireland, but elsewhere – in Great Britain or in America.
What benefit was Ireland getting from the education of the thousands of young men and women who had left the country altogether? The object of national education was to build up a nation, and in every parish the object should be to build up the parish as part of that. It was not to provide for the boys and girls who were going to leave for America or Great Britain. That had been done in Denmark, and could be done here.
Young people should get an education that would centre their minds in their own place and in the work of the locality, and not the education that would only make them happy when they were listening in to wireless communications from London or some place thousands of miles away.
http://url.ie/d54w