Catholics in the Protestant state
Catholics in Ulster 1603-1983: An Interpretative History by Oliver P Rafferty (Gill & MacMillan, 1994)
Early alienation
In the initial stages, as we have seen, many northern Catholics supported the treaty arrangements, not because they liked the idea of partition but because they shared the optimistic view that the new `Ulster' could not long endure and that soon the border would become but a figment of Protestant Unionist imagination. This attitude did not prevent them from demanding at a quite early stage the immediate inclusion of obviously nationalist areas such as Derry city, Tyrone and Fermanagh in the Irish Free State. Their hostility and indifference to the northern parliament grew out of hearty disdain for an institution they regarded as ephemeral and irrelevant to postwar Ireland. It seemed pointless for Ulster Catholics to engage with a new transitory political arrangement clearly marked for an early demise.
The results of the civil war in the Irish Free State to some extent began a sense of alienation and despair among northern Catholics in their dealings with both parts of Ireland. While many northerners actually fought on the Free State side, it quickly became clear that the Cosgrave government, despite the presence in it of northerners such as Ernest Blythe, did not - understandably - intend to give northern Catholic affairs a high priority in Free State policy.
Setting aside their hostility in principle to what was in effect a Protestant
state, the Catholic authorities quickly became immersed in dealings with
the new political order over the question of education. The issue here was
one of clerical control, coupled with a desire to secure as much money as
possible from the state to support the Catholic system. The Church favoured
none of the various schemes on offer to deal with educational provision.
It spurned the relatively liberal `four and two system', advanced in 1925,
whereby in voluntary schools four of the managers would be appointed by
the Church and two by the local authority, in exchange for substantial state
financial assistance. The idea that democratic control could have any place
in Catholic education was firmly repudiated by Cardinal O'Donnell: `It is
a great fallacy to suppose that election is the only way, or always the
best way to find a representative man. Among Catholics there is no more
representative person in the parish than the average parish priest....'
`Lord Londonderry's Education Act of 1923 aimed at providing a system of integrated education at least at the primary level. Under its provisions Catholic schools were to lose the grants they had under the national school arrangements, which amounted to two-thirds of building and equipment costs. Londonderry was determined to resist building the idea of religious instruction in the new system, asserting: `Religion instruction in a denominational sense during the hours of compulsory attendance there will not be'.2 He did not reckon with the defiance this would meet from the Protestant clergy and the Orange Order. By February 1925 Orange Lodge officials had formed an alliance with the `United Education Committee of the Protestant Churches', to pressure the government into amending the 1923 act. In particular they wanted the power to appoint only Protestant teachers to `state' schools , or at last representation on appointments committees for Protestant clergy, and a repeal of the provisions that forbade religious instruction. After some initial resistance Londonderry, under pressure also from the prime minister Sir James Craig, interpreted the amending bill of 1925 in the sense specified by the Protestant-Orange alliance. He then offered his resignation.
By 1928-9 the Protestant Churches again agitated for further reforms of
the state system in a more specifically Protestant direction, covering much
the same ground as the previous demands. The 1930 act made more explicit
what had been simply tolerated under the 1925 act. The intention of the
new act was, in the words of the Prime Minister, to `make the provided and
transferred schools safe for Protestant children'.3 Given such clear manipulation
of the system by the majority population the Catholic hierarchy acted decisively
in its own self-interest. The bishops threatened that if the grants to Catholic
schools that had been abolished in 1923 were not restored then they would
take legal action to refer the 1930 measure to the judicial committee of
the privy council since it manifestly contravened the provision of the Government
of Ireland Act of 1920, which had forbidden the endowment of any Church.
On the principle that two wrongs make a right, the government offered the
bishops 50 per cent grants for building and equipment costs in Catholic
schools - they already paid teachers' salaries in such schools.
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