Royal Irish Academy

“ The library of the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin was established on the formation of the Academy in 1785 for the purpose of promoting the study of science, literature and antiquities in Ireland. The library possesses about 80,000 printed vols. and MSS. There is a large collection of MSS. and books relating to the history, ancient language, and antiquities of Ireland. They include the Betham collection, acquired partly by public subscription in 1851. ”

“ He died at Gray's Inn in April 1789, leaving a legacy of 1,000l. to the Royal Irish Academy for the encouragement of learning in Ireland by the bestowal of prizes on literary or scientific works of distinguished merit. The council made every effort to secure a portrait or bust of their benefactor, but none existed. ”

“ Maxwell Close, has placed Irish-speaking Ireland under yet another debt of gratitude to him. It is not always that which is most ancient which is most valuable from a literary or a national point of view. The pity of it is that any Irish MS. that comes into the market should not be bought up for the nation with the money assigned by the Government and confided to the Royal Irish Academy for Irish studies, unless a special search should show that the Academy already possesses a copy of each piece in it. ”

“ Prior to this he had become a member of the Royal Irish Academy, to whose ‘Proceedings’ he was a diligent contributor. From 1875 to 1880 he acted as secretary for foreign correspondence to the Academy, and in 1879 was awarded its Cunningham gold medal in recognition of his scientific attainments. ”

“ At Mason's suggestion the committee of the Irish Society founded in 1844 two Bedell scholarships and a premium in Dublin University for encouraging the study of the Irish language. He took a great interest, moreover, and he was mainly instrumental in the establishment there of a professorship of Irish. On 22 June 1812 he was elected member of the Royal Irish Academy, and subsequently contributed four papers to vol. ”

“ An effort—a great and decided one—must be made to have the Irish Academy so endowed out of the revenues of Ireland that it may be A National School of Irish History and Literature and a Museum of Irish Antiquities on the largest scale. In fact, the Academy should be a secular Irish College, with professors of our old language, literature, history, antiquities, and topography; with suitable schools, lecture-rooms, and museums. ”

“ LIST [321] OF LIBRARIES CONTAINING MSS. WITH IRISH GLOSSES THEREON NOT LATER THAN END OF NINTH OR BEGINNING OF TENTH CENTURY: Trinity College Library, Dublin. Library of the Franciscan Monastery, Dublin. Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. British Museum, London. Lambert Library, South London. University Library, Cambridge, England. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. St. John’s College, Cambridge. Bodleian Library, Oxford, England. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Library of Nancy. Library of Cambray. University Library, Leyden. University Library, Würzburg. ”

“ True, there have been many fine artists, who have made a struggle to fix themselves in Dublin, but, as with the Royal Hibernian Academy, of which the best of them were members, the struggle has been a painful agony. Usually the artist migrated to London to join the large group of Irishmen working there; a few others went to America and obtained an honored place in her art annals. Those who went to England secured in many cases the highest rewards of the profession. Several, like Barry, Hone, Barrett, and Cotes, were founders or early members of the Royal Academy ”

“ A diocesan college at Kilkenny, and the Dublin University, were alone open to the youth of the country. But the University remained exclusively in possession of the Protestant interest, nor did it give to the world during the century, except Usher, Ware and Orrery, any graduate of national, not to say, European reputation. In the bye-ways of the South and West, in the Irish colleges on the continent of Europe—at Paris, Louvain, Lisle, Salamanca, Lisbon, or Rome—the children of the proscribed majority could alone acquire a degree in learning, human or divine. ”

“ The Dublin Society was founded for the promotion of husbandry and other useful arts. Its labours to serve agriculture have been repeated and extensive, though not always judicious. It has also endeavoured to promote manufactures. It has gardens and museums fitter for scientific than practical instruction, admirable lecturers, a library most generously opened, a drawing-school of the largest purposes and of equivocal success, and various minor branches.
The Irish Academy has some of this fault. It endeavours to unite antiquarianism and abstract science. ”

“ Yet Catholics and Nationalists alike infinitely prefer a university or a college or a school with strong Protestant beliefs, or strong Imperialist patriotism, to an institution with neither beliefs nor patriotism at all. The colourless and merely scholastic ideals of the Queen's Colleges, and the huge examining machinery known as the Royal University, typified in their total lack of moral influences all that was worst in the educational system under which Ireland labours. ”

“ There was already the beginning of a university in the ancient school of Armagh lying on the famous hill where for long ages the royal tombs of the O'Neills had been preserved. "The strong burh of Tara has died," they said, "while Armagh lives filled with learned champions." It now rose to a great position. With its three thousand scholars, famous for its teachers, under its high-ollave Gorman who spent twenty-one years of study, from 1133 to 1154, in England and France, it became in fact the national university for the Irish race in Ireland and Scotland. ”

“ Trinity has never been the University of Ireland. It is ceasing to be the University of Protestant Ireland, for Protestants, who can afford to do so, send their sons increasingly to Oxford or Cambridge, and Trinity, which has not known how to create a true and special function for itself, is becoming merely a cheap substitute for these English institutions. And the reason for this is a moral reason which goes to the root of many questions connected with Irish education. Should Irish schools and colleges seek to educate citizens for the Empire, or citizens for Ireland? ”

“ Carlow, Kilkenny, Wexford, and other cities have Catholic colleges, and there are Protestant seats of learning in Ulster and other provinces. Cork, Belfast, and Galway have each branch universities, called “Queen’s Colleges,” which are conducted on a non-sectarian basis. These are only a few of Ireland’s educational institutions, but they serve to illustrate the agreeable fact that a dearth of opportunity for acquiring learning is no longer a reproach to the Irish people, or, rather, to their English law-makers. ”

“ Some of the more distinguished youths were helped by generous patrons, or from the revenues of ecclesiastical benefices to pursue a higher course of studies in theology and canon law. As the various attempts made to found a university in Ireland during the fourteen and fifteenth centuries [23] proved a failure, students who wished to obtain a degree were obliged to go to Oxford, from which various attempts were made to exclude "the mere Irish" by legislation, [24] to Cambridge, Paris, or some of the other great schools on the Continent. ”

“ Trinity College, Dublin, was founded in 1591, under the auspices of Sir John Perrot, the Irish viceroy. A royal charter nominated a provost and a minimum number of Trinity College, Dublin. three fellows and three scholars as a body corporate, empowered to establish among themselves “whatever laws of either of the universities of Cambridge or Oxford they may judge to be apt and suitable; and especially that no other persons should teach or profess the liberal arts in Ireland without the queen's special licence.” ”

“ It is the oldest and most influential of the learned societies of Ireland, and possesses a large number of ancient manuscripts in the Gaelic tongue, most of them, despite their great age, beautifully clear and legible. The academy, according to its charter, was founded “for the encouragement of science, polite literature, and antiquities.” There is a good deal of interest in the attempt to revive the Gaelic tongue, but the bitter partisanship of politics renders polite literature quite useless. ”

“ Elementary Education has made great way; but the very ignorance for which these Institutions are meant as a remedy makes the class of Irishmen fit to fill Professors' chairs small indeed; and, small as it is, it yearly loses its best men by emigration to London, where they find rewards, fame, and excitement. The dismissal, hereafter, of incompetent men would be a painful, but—if pedants, dunces, and cheats were crammed into the chairs—an unavoidable task. A gradual increase of such Colleges will better suit the progress of Irish intelligence than a sudden and final endowment. ”

“ Nothing can so completely stamp the character of the university of Dublin as their suppression of the only school of eloquence in Ireland—“The Historical Society;”—a school from which arose some of the most distinguished, able, and estimable characters that ever appeared in the forum, or in the parliament of Ireland: this step was what the blundering Irish would call—“advancing backwards.” ”

“ He proposed to establish four great provincial academies, a second university in some north-western county, to reform the twenty-two diocesan schools, so richly endowed under the 28th Henry VIII., and to affiliate on Trinity College two principal preparatory schools, north and south. In 1784, and again in this very year, the humane John Howard had reported of the Irish Charter Schools, then half a century established, that they were "a disgrace to all society." ”

“ Secondary education has not yet been placed on a scientific basis, and is not that natural stepping-stone between the primary school and the university that it ought to be. There is no intelligent co-ordination of studies in Ireland and we suffer as no other country from ignorantly imposed "systems" which have had for their object, not the development of Irish brains but the Anglicisation of Irish youth, who were drenched with the mire of "foreign" learning when they should have been bathed in the pure stream of Irish thought and culture. ”

“ There were also great numbers of schools not held in monasteries, conducted by laymen, some for general learning, such as History, Poetry, Grammar, Latin, Greek, Irish, the Sciences, &c.; and some for teaching and training young men for professions, such as lawyers and doctors. And these schools helped greatly to spread learning, though they were not so well known outside Ireland as the monastic schools.
The Irish professors were so famed for their learning, and the colleges were so excellent, that students came to them from every country of Europe: but more from Great Britain than elsewhere. ”

“ Through a School of Irish Learning Dublin is becoming a national centre of true Irish scholarship, and may hope to be the leader of the world in this great branch of study. The popular Irish movement manifested itself in the Gaelic League, whose branches now cover all Ireland, and which has been the greatest educator of the people since the time of Thomas Davis. Voluntary colleges have sprung up in every province, where earnest students learn the language, history, and music of their country ”

“ This noble tradition of free education to strangers lasted down to the establishment of the so-called "National" schools in Ireland, for down to that time "poor scholars" were freely supported by the people and helped in their studies. The number of scribes whose deaths have been considered worth recording by the annalists is very great, and books consequently must have been very numerous. This plentifulness of books probably added to the renown of the Irish schools. An English prince as well as a French one was educated by them in the seventh century ”

“ Their earnest single pursuit of learning in the widest sense attainable, their solid hard work as scholars is no less characteristic. Ireland was once the university not only of Northern England, but of the Frankish realm and if that progress was arrested after the fatal inroads of the Norsemen after 795 A.D. the seed which the Scots had sown in other lands grew to a nobler maturity than ever it reached on its own soil. ... Wherever they went they founded schools.” [537]
Many other tributes to Irish monastic scholarship might be quoted. ”

“ Bryce's University Bill, which would have united the youth of Ireland in one grand university, in which Trinity might have been the proud leader of Irish University education. That legislation on education should be demanded on the lines of a mixed system is quite unreasonable, being a matter of very divided opinion; but as to the keen and successful competition of the Roman Catholic schools and colleges with all the older institutions in the country there is no question among those who know. ”

“ Never perhaps had there been such a combination of talent directed to the one end of restoring Irish knowledge. For the first time during centuries of exclusion, Irish students were brought into close and constant communication in their own country with men of trained intelligence, and encouraged to use their skill for the benefit of their country. Once more Ireland had such a school [56] as those which in the periods of her great revivals in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries gathered up and left to us all the relics of Irish history that we possess. ”

“ There are several departments, a staff of seven professors, and an average of two hundred and fifty students, most of whom are studying for the Presbyterian ministry. Magee is the only college in Ireland which has been founded and supported entirely by private benefactions. It has never received a dollar from the state, although there is an annual grant from the Irish Society, which owns the city of Londonderry. Under a recent act of parliament it is united with Queen’s College, Belfast, on equal terms in the new university bill. ”