is still very bad.[59] Many of the school-houses are, in the words of the Commissioners, “mere hovels,” unsanitary, leaky, ill-ventilated.  The distribution of schools and funds is chaotic and wasteful.  Out of 8,401 schools (in 1909-10)[60] nearly two hundred have an average daily attendance of less than fifteen pupils.  In 1730 the number is less than thirty, and it is not only in sparsely inhabited country districts, but in big towns, that the distribution is bad.  The power of the Commissioners to stop the creation of unduly small schools, and even semi-bogus establishments which come into being in the great cities, is imperfect.  Another example of the curious mixture of anarchy and despotism that the system of Irish government presents may be seen in the Annual Report of the Commissioners.  With a mutinous audacity which would be laughable, if the case were one for laughing, the Commissioners openly rail at the Treasury for the parsimony of its grants, and, in order to stir its compassion, paint the condition of Irish education in black colours.  Imagine the various Departmental Ministers in Great Britain publicly attacking in their Annual Reports the Cabinet of which they were members!  The Treasury, needless to say, is not to blame.  It pays out of the common Imperial purse all but a negligible fraction of the cost of primary education in Ireland.  Nothing is raised by rates, and only L141,096 (in 1909-10) from voluntary and local sources, as compared with L1,688,547 from State grants.  The Treasury has no guarantee that this money is well spent; on the contrary, it knows from the Reports of the Commissioners themselves that a great deal of it is very badly spent.  The business is a comic opera, but it has a tragic significance for Ireland.  Primary education is so bad that a great number of the pupils are absolutely unfit to receive the expensive and excellent technical instruction organized by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, and contributed to by the ratepayers.  The Belfast Technical Institute, for example, has to go outside its proper functions, and spend from its too small stock in providing introductory courses in elementary subjects, so as to equip children for the reception of higher knowledge.[61] All over the country the complaint is the same.  No machinery whatever exists for co-ordinating primary, secondary, technical, and University education, and opportioning funds in an economical and profitable manner.

Religion is the immediate cause of the trouble; absence of popular control the fundamental cause.  The national system of primary education, designed originally in 1831 to be undenominational, has become rigidly denominational.  Out of 8,401 primary schools, 2,461 only are attended by both Protestants and Roman Catholics.  The rest are of an exclusively sectarian character.  Even the Protestants do not combine.  The Church of Ireland, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and other smaller denominations, frequently have small separate schools in the same parish.  The management (save in the model schools, which are attended only by Protestants) is exclusively sectarian, the local clergyman, Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, or Nonconformist having almost autocratic control over the school.