"Godless Colleges" and Mixed Education in Ireland : Extracts from Speeches and Writings of Thomas Wyse, Daniel O'Connell, Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, Frank Hugh O'Donnell and Others

Thomas Wyse, who entered Parliament as a result of the 1829 Catholic Emancipation which he helped to bring about, deserves to be better known.

He was responsible for the form in which National Education was established: he desired that primary school children of all denominations should be educated together, in order to bridge the cultural divide in Ireland. And, indeed, National Education remained multi-denominational for many decades after its establishment in 1831.

Wyse also conceived the project of non-sectarian academical education, and it was his ideas which stimulated Peel to propose the establishment and generous endowment of three Irish non-denominational Colleges in 1845.

At these, Religious Education was to be separate from secular instruction, and its teachers were to be privately funded.

The project ran into the fierce opposition of Daniel O'Connell and his son, John.

The Catholic Church in Ireland was then in transition from the Gallicanism of Archbishop Murray to the Ultramontanism of Reverend Paul Cullen, still in Rome.

The Ultramontanists disliked mixed National Education and were determined not to see the principle extended to higher education. This view found a vigorous and able lay expression in the O'Connells.

In the Debates of the Repeal Association Daniel and John opposed what they called "Godless Colleges" and demanded state endowment of separate Colleges for Catholics and Presbyterians, with Trinity to be kept for Protestants.

They failed. The Queen's Colleges were established, though blighted by Church opposition and the lack of demand for higher education.

However, when the present University system came to be established in 1908, the principles underlying Peel's measure were applied: the Colleges were non-denominational and remain so.

This book reprints an account of Thomas Wyse's educational work by his niece, Winifrede Wyse; carries some extracts from the Repeal Association debates between the O'Connellites and the Young Ireland group centred on "The Nation"; and reproduces extracts from the writings by Frank Hugh O'Donnell, an Irish Parliamentarian, who had attended Queen's College, Galway.