CHAPTER VII

FORCES OF REGENERATION AND THEIR EFFECT

“George A. Birmingham” (who in private life is Canon Hannay), in his admirable book, An Irishman Looks at his World, tells us:  “The most important educational work in Ireland during the last twenty years has been done independently of universities or schools,” and in this statement I entirely agree with him.  And I may add that in this work Canon Hannay himself bore no inconsiderable part.  During a political campaign in Mayo in 1910 I had some delightful conversations with Canon Hannay in my hotel at Westport, and his views expressed in the volume from which I quote are only a development of those which he then outlined.  Both as to the vexed questions then disturbing North and South Ireland and as to the lines along which national growth ought to take place we had much in common.  We agreed that nationality means much more than mere political independence—­that it is founded on the character and intellect of the people, that it lives and is expressed in its culture, customs and traditions, in its literature, its songs and its arts.  We saw hope for Ireland because she was remaking and remoulding herself from within—­the only sure way in which she could work out her eventual salvation, whatever political parties or combinations may come or go.

This process of regeneration took firm root when the parties were exhausting themselves in mournful internal strife.  Through the whole of the nineteenth century it had been the malign purpose of England to destroy the spirit of nationality through its control of the schools.  Just as in the previous century it sought to reduce Ireland to a state of servitude through the operations of the Penal Laws, so it now sought to continue its malefic purpose by a system of education “so bad that if England had wished to kill Ireland’s soul when she imposed it on the Sister Isle she could not have discovered a better means of doing so” (M.  Paul Dubois).  And the same authority ascribes the fatalism, the lethargy, the moral inertia and intellectual passivity, the general absence of energy and character which prevailed in Ireland ten or twelve years ago to the fact that England struck at Ireland through her brain and sought to demoralise and ruin the national mind.

Thank God for it that the effort failed, but it failed mainly owing to the fact that a new generation of prophets had arisen in Ireland who saw that in the revival and reform of national education rested the best hope for the future.  They recalled the gospel of Thomas Davis and the other noble minds of the Young Ireland era that we needs must educate in order that we may be free.  They sought to give form and effect to the splendid ideals of the Young Irelanders.  A new spirit was abroad, and not in matters educational alone.  The doctrine of self-help and self-reliance was being preached and, what was better, practised.