Educating Ireland

The history of education in Ireland is a developing field well served by studies of institutions and state policy.Footnote ⁸ A national system of primary education developed in 1831. As Kevin Lougheed has argued, this was “seemingly before it should have,” predating as it did national provision in England, Scotland, and Wales by forty years. Its early emergence led to both the centrality of religion in the curriculum and the dominance of the English language, which had lasting implications in “shaping the minds of [the] Irish peasantry and working classes.”Footnote ⁹ Thus, state sponsored primary education was one mechanism by which Irish subjects were formed into imperial citizens.Footnote ¹⁰ For the majority of Irish children from humble agricultural and urban backgrounds, intermediate schools proved out of reach as they were fee paying and profit based. Donald Akenson has noted the sectarian divide of education in these schools, where roughly half of students were Catholic and where schools pursued “idiosyncratic” and “erratic individual courses.”Footnote ¹¹ As Ciaran O’Neill has shown, Ireland’s Catholic elite often sought intermediate education outside of Ireland. Those that stayed at the elite Irish secondary institutions, such as Clongowes, sometimes had imperial careers, but most “were far more likely to end up as landowners or professionals within Irish society.”Footnote ¹² The lack of appropriate intermediate education for most of the population proved a constant frustration among academic staff and university administrators of the QCs who complained of having to raise students to university standards, costing precious classroom time and affecting academic performance.

Higher education has received far more attention from historians, particularly the “Irish University Question.” This revolved around the exclusivity of Trinity College Dublin (TCD), a Protestant institution of immense wealth that limited the access of non-Anglicans, and the quest by the Catholic majority of the island to gain a Catholic university.Footnote ¹³ While these studies have taken into account the creation of QU and its constituent colleges, they have cast the QCs as a foil in their narratives, both an impediment to overcome and an example of the false promises made to the majority of Ireland’s population. The historiography of the Irish university question thus has its own teleological unfolding: the eventual triumph of a Catholic university (University College, Dublin) running in parallel with the birth of the Irish (read: Catholic) nation-state. This settlement—the 1908 Universities Bill—was negotiated and imperfect, and its dispensation, which included the creation of the separate Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), presaged the eventual partitionism that drove British policy on the island.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet this focus on the creation of a national university that was Catholic, in order to represent the majority of the island’s population, arguably obscures as much as it reveals.

If one places the creation of the QU and constituent QCs into their broader UK and imperial contexts, acknowledging the connection between higher education and imperial networks,Footnote ¹⁵ a different narrative emerges. Building on a growing corpus of scholarship over the past thirty years that has explored Irish involvement with British imperialism, both as anti-imperial critic and as willing participants in imperial ventures,Footnote ¹⁶ this article makes two distinct but interconnected arguments. First, it contends that exploring the imperial dimensions of the creation of the QCs, and the justification by administrators of their annual parliamentary maintenance, helps to uncover the competing interests and the unintended consequences that followed. Higher education policy became another vector for Irish integration by British policymakers, one that ran into the shoals of Ireland’s distinct history and religious make-up and forced politicians to balance sensitivities to the past while they considered how to create a nonsectarian Irish future within the United Kingdom and British Empire.Footnote ¹⁷ Second, the article also argues that empire was at the heart of the QCs from their inception and worked as a bulwark against their critics.Footnote ¹⁸ The success of Irish students in imperial careers led to fundamental changes in the examination process that curtailed the success of the QCs.Footnote ¹⁹ At roughly the same moment, the QU system folded under the constant pressure of the Irish Catholic hierarchy, leading to the establishment in 1879 of a new nonresidential university, the Royal University of Ireland (RUI), which had serious consequences for the vitality of the QCs. Nevertheless, imperial careers continued to provide a focus for the institutions well into the early twentieth century, despite other nationalist currents sweeping the country.

Creating the Queen’s University: A Nonsectarian Future?

At the beginning of 1845, in the wake of Daniel O’Connell’s fracturing repeal movement and the break-up of Irish nationalism more generally, Sir Robert Peel’s conservative government donned “sackcloth and ashes” and “ate dirt” by repudiating their former coercive tendencies and attempting to conciliate Ireland with further reform.Footnote ²⁰ Most controversially, this included increasing the government grant to Maynooth College, the seminary responsible for training Catholic priests, which infuriated Peel’s ultra-Tory flank.Footnote ²¹ Peel’s other plan, introduced by his home secretary, Sir James Graham, was to create three provincial colleges in Ireland modeled on the principle of no religious tests for students or professors, which he considered “sound principles with reference to the peculiar circumstances of the country.”Footnote ²² The government planned to spend in excess of £100,000 on the colleges’ construction, while taxpayers would be on the hook for their annual operating budgets.

Graham, in outlining the government’s scheme, cast a vision of the future that saw the colleges as a mechanism to build a post-sectarian society, a prerequisite step toward British citizenship and imperial participation. Reminding the House of the competition among the colleges of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, he suggested that many would recall their own collegiate experiences where “honourable rivalry” had spurred men to higher achievements, forged social connections based on “esteem and respect,” and thus exercised “the most beneficial influence on the community generally.”Footnote ²³ This vision of competition extended to Graham’s hope for academic institutions in Ireland—that the government, by creating a “central University” had the chance to promote “fair and honourable rivalry and competition” where students from different colleges might compete for prizes and scholarships “without reference to creed or party distinction,” which Graham contended would bring “that great moral effect … and beneficial influence in after life.”Footnote ²⁴ This language was aspirational, as the legislation was only to create the colleges. Nevertheless, the government’s belief in mixed education’s transformative power to turn sectarian tensions into productive competition was evident at the colleges’ foundation.Footnote ²⁵ Concluding his speech, Graham emphasized that the founding of these colleges in Ireland would “conduce to the concord, the order, the peace and the virtue of that country.”Footnote ²⁶ The home secretary offered similar sentiments in his private correspondence, writing to the lord lieutenant, Lord Heytesbury, that the university scheme was the path “for laying the foundation of future concord and social improvement.”Footnote ²⁷ Peel expressed the same viewpoint on the bill’s second reading, suggesting that “the effect of improved education will be to soften the asperities which arise in Ireland…differences which greatly embitter social life.”Footnote ²⁸

While ministers hoped the bill would bring future dividends of prosperity and social cohesion to Ireland, its popular reception underscored the inadequacy of the government’s program to alleviate Irish grievances. Over the summer of 1845 the Times published a number of articles attacking Peel and Graham for their misplaced policy. The newspaper censured the principle of nonreligious education as alien to the United Kingdom and condemned the government’s assumption that education bills represented conciliation.Footnote ²⁹ One article offered an extended metaphor of policymaking as akin to tailoring appropriate clothing, and, quite condescendingly, suggested that the Irish had their own “tastes” that the bill failed to account for. “The native Hibernian, rude as he is, has a fashion of his own,” it reported. “It may be superstitious,” the article continued, “but it must be respected.” In the estimation of the Times, by ignoring local religious feeling, government ministers imposed “the odium of compelling an atheistic education in Ireland,” which Irish people would interpret not as conciliation but rather as “a persecution.”Footnote ³⁰ Articles also questioned the quality of education that would be offered at universities that did not incorporate religious teaching, and its impact on an “underbred” Irish population that was dependent on these colleges. Indeed, argued the Times, the QCs would “supply an intellectual force beyond all conceivable demand.”Footnote ³¹ Another suggested that the government’s desire to take religion out of education, “neutralizing for secular purposes so many and so diverse religions,” was completely “new on British soil.”Footnote ³² By August, the newspaper suggested that the educational policy of Peel and Graham demonstrated “that an English Legislature is unequal to the task of Irish government” as the bills did nothing to alleviate “grievances of a badly fed, badly housed, and badly clothed people,” and wondering whether Daniel O’Connell had a legitimate point about repeal.Footnote ³³ Throughout the month, and into September, the Times used details from the recently published Devon CommissionFootnote ³⁴ to highlight the structural social and economic failings across the Irish countryside, each time underscoring how neither new colleges, nor more money to Maynooth, could “stay one hour any outrage which a starving, and desperate, and hopeless man may be driven to.”Footnote ³⁵

A variety of national and provincial newspapers commented on and debated the Times’s coverage of the issue throughout September. Reaction in Ireland depended in large part on the audience in question, with positive local responses in Belfast, Cork, and Galway thrown into sharp relief by the overwhelming hostility of O’Connell’s camp of nationalists, the Irish hierarchy of the Catholic Church, as well as Protestant conservatives worried about the secularizing trend. For many, separating religious belief from academic study represented a moral hazard: when religion was removed from education, what happens to the faith of the educated and wider society? Thus, in the words of the petitioners to the Presbyterian Assembly of Belfast in 1846, any support of the college and its nonsectarian ethos risked placing “truth and error, Christ and anti-Church, under the same sentence of exclusion from the educational institutions of the country.”Footnote ³⁶ John O’Connell, speaking before the remnants of the Loyal National Repeal Association in November 1850 offered similar arguments. O’Connell attacked the first president of QCC, the eminent chemist Sir Robert Kane, himself a Catholic, as “the Pope of the crawling Cawtholics of the Castle…doing the dirty work of the government” and argued that the QCs lacked “safeguards against irreligion and immorality.”Footnote ³⁷ O’Connell pledged to his audience “a Catholic University capable of giving degrees” to great applause. Repealers used even stronger language in 1845 in the midst of the bill’s passage. They argued that anyone who took employment in the college should be labeled a “traitor to his country” and that families who elected to educate their sons at the colleges should be “held up to scorn and execration.”Footnote ³⁸ For O’Connell, as well as the Catholic hierarchy, an education that reflected the needs of the Irish nation must be Catholic in its orientation. John Henry Newman, the first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, viewed the mission of the university—the pursuit of knowledge, all of which comes from God and therefore reflected in the doctrine of the one-true Church—as impossible to separate from theology.Footnote ³⁹ As is well known, papal authorities issued rescripts in 1847 and 1848 condemning the colleges, and in 1850 the Synod of Thurles condemned mixed education, that is students of different faiths learning alongside each other.Footnote ⁴⁰

The vision of a national university in Ireland proposed by the British government, therefore, reflected different ambitions— an opportunity to remake Irish civil society on nonsectarian lines, creating institutions that “belong to the state—to the people, and not to any church.”Footnote ⁴¹ Of course, this was not the mapping of British models onto Ireland, considering the historic importance of sectarianism in English higher education. Nevertheless, the establishment of the University of London in 1836, with its federated organization, nonsectarian ethos, and nonresidential arrangements was a crucial forerunner to the QCs’ foundation.Footnote ⁴² The London system was modified, however, by restricting the granting of degrees from QU only to students taught at the QCs, in part to protect from the potential of lowering educational standards, but also to guard against Catholic hierarchical influence.Footnote ⁴³ A long editorial in the Times in 1850 offered a picture of government opinion about the importance of the QCs in Ireland’s post-famine future. It played on stock stereotypes about Ireland’s disposition to violence and political instability but was much more positive about higher education in Ireland than the paper had been five years earlier. “The soil of Ireland is passing into the hands of solvent owners—the property of Ireland has been charged with the support of the Irish poor,” the writer suggested, and “a greatly extended franchise has been recently conceded.” Yet, it warned, “they will turn out practically inoperative unless the minds of the people can be brought into harmony with the spirit that has dictated the recent alterations in the law.” The solution, according to the article, could only be found in education. The article recommended that Irish reformers should see these mixed schools as “the keystone of the country’s advancement in civilization.” To give them up, it argued, “is to abandon all hope for Ireland.” Attacks on the QCs, it claimed, were “in reality directed against a more important institution,” the Act of Union.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Evening Mail cast the QCs as “the healing measure” for Irish society, which would break the spell of “‘Orange-man’ and ‘Papist.’”Footnote ⁴⁵ Irish newspapers, many of them otherwise ideologically opposed to most sentiments expressed in the Times, offered similar assessments. Praising the “favourable impression” the colleges had made “on the public mind,” the Galway Vindicator defended the system as one “by which Irishmen will be taught to love each other and learn that they have a common country to serve—common liberties and common rights to defend.”Footnote ⁴⁶ By invoking both a shared national identity as Irishmen as well as the rights inherited as citizens of the United Kingdom, proponents of the QCs believed they had the power to transform narrow parochialism into British citizenship.

One way to tell whether Irish men from differing denominations were learning “to love each other” was by counting them. The legislation for the QCs mandated that the president of each college furnish an annual report to Parliament that included statistics about denominational breakdown, age, curriculum, and examination materials. The presidents did all they could in these reports to call attention to the success of mixed education. According to the president of UCG, Edward Berwick, where past sectarian strife had marred Irish history and stunted its capacity for productive enterprise, the QCs operated “as seminaries of united education” with students of “different persuasions now united in their class-rooms.” This, he argued, was “laying the groundwork for the future prosperity of our country.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The president of QCB, Dr P. Shuldham Henry, concluded his 1857 report by underscoring the existence at his college of “rivalry without dissension, of competition without jealousy, and of a growing sentiment of Collegiate fellowship unmixed with any feeling of sectarian animosity.” This not only demonstrates “the perfect practicability,” he argued, but also “the great individual and public advantage of united education.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Newspapers brought these arguments to the reading public. “We all know the bitter animosities—the antagonism enlisted in the determined and systematic crusade against these institutions; and yet, notwithstanding all those adverse agencies and sinister influences, what do we find to be the result?” asked the Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial in October 1861. It reported that of the 657 men who had attended the Queen’s College the previous session, 181 were Protestants, 202 Catholics, 212 Presbyterians, and 62 of other denominations. “Do not these figures afford most triumphant and decisive proofs of the success of mixed education in Ireland?,” the paper concluded.Footnote ⁴⁹ Many of these commentators employed religious language in their defenses of mixed education—“the blessings,” the university as a “seminary,” the “systemic crusade” of the Catholic Church—as an attempt to defend against the criticism of the university as harbinger of spiritual decay, a danger to faith and morals.

The most spirited defense of mixed education came from the most prominent man connected to the QCs, Sir Robert Kane, the president of QCC. Kane had risen to prominence as a scientific wonder in the 1830s: he was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 1831, appointed lecturer at the Royal Dublin Society, and later served on the government’s Scientific Commission to diagnose and treat the potato blight. Most importantly for the fledgling QCs, Kane was a prominent Catholic willing to attach himself to the project.Footnote ⁵⁰ In an undated memo in Lord Clarendon’s papers as lord lieutenant, Kane made the crucial argument against the University of London model of nonresidential examinations, arguing that if ecclesiastical college students could take the QU exam, no Catholics would attend the QCs, thus making them appear sectarian as a result.Footnote ⁵¹ Kane marked himself for particular odium from the Catholic hierarchy in an address delivered at the distribution of prizes to students in October 1850. In the long speech, first published in The Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial Courier and later distributed as a pamphlet, Kane criticized the Church’s opposition to the QCs, which he argued was inconsistent with their established educational policies in the rest of Europe.Footnote ⁵² While this galled Catholic outlets like the Tablet, what was more telling was Kane’s focus on the importance of the colleges’ work in Ireland. Building on themes from his influential book, Industrial Resources of Ireland, Kane argued that “the improvement of a country can only be effected by raising the Physical, Intellectual, and Moral standard of the people,” stressing that these goals were “embodied in these Colleges.” In making his case, Kane drew on Ireland’s peculiarity—specifically, its history—to craft his vision of an enlightened, educated future:

Thus, in the eyes of its proponents, the QCs were about educating Ireland’s rising middle classes under a particular ideological vision. This rewrote past histories in favor of nonsectarian national futures and thus opened up the possibility of not simply national unity, but also a more comfortable union between Irish and British men endeavoring toward the common ends of good governance at home and abroad.

Competitive Examinations and the Queen’s University

Running in parallel with the desire to enlarge third-level education in Ireland, and thus reconfigure Irish civil society, was a push among government officials to remake the civil services. Historians have disagreed about the motivations for reforming the Home and Indian Civil Services (ICS). Nevertheless, between 1853 and 1855 the British government reformed the mechanism by which they selected civil servants from one based on patronage to one based on competitive examination.Footnote ⁵⁴ At least one aspiration, among many competing ones, was the hope among officialdom that competitive examination would ensure that Britain’s best educated (whom they assumed would be drawn from the upper classes) would find their way to careers administering Britain’s increasingly complex empire, thus protecting it from the influence of the lower classes. Heather Ellis has made this point most explicitly, noting that the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms aimed to privilege those who undertook a university training in classical studies, especially the recently reformed degree at Oxford, and to reward “civil servants of a higher moral character.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In Ireland, however, those at Dublin Castle identified other benefits. As Kieran Flanagan has argued, competitive examinations appeared to remove religious preference and political considerations from the equation of appointments and would have the advantage of legitimizing the government through the appearance of impartiality and a broader-based recruitment.Footnote ⁵⁶ Sir Charles Trevelyan, one of the architects of the scheme, recognized the overlap between government hopes for Ireland’s future and the emerging meritocratic designs of examination. Replying to critiques of examination, Trevelyan stated: “What a beneficial stimulus would be given to liberal education in Ireland if such prizes were held out?” He identified the QCs as the institution best situated to serve the public interest: “Where is there a better class of persons to be found for the service of the public than the best of the youth educated at the Queen’s Colleges?”Footnote ⁵⁷ Trevelyan also appealed to Dublin Castle about whether TCD or the QCs might have “first-rate” professors that government could select as examiners. He was particularly interested in those specializing in the fields of political economy and moral philosophy, an interesting choice for an Irish institution rebuilding after the famine, which historians agree was at the very least exacerbated by Trevelyan’s own commitment to political economy.Footnote ⁵⁸

From their inception, administrators recognized the importance of using the QCs as a training ground for imperial service. This can be seen most clearly at QCC where, even before competitive examinations were introduced, Sir Robert Kane lobbied for a close relationship between the college and the East India Company’s administration. Kane boasted in 1857 how he “endeavoured to attract the attention to the great advantages which should accrue to the public service from the new system of Education … especially in the Indian and the Military services.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Sometime in 1850 or 1851 he had written to the India Board appealing for materials, especially books, to facilitate the training of students in Indian languages, literature, and history. As a result, the college received a consignment of specialized literature for QCC’s library shelves. More importantly, however, Kane obtained the unprecedented concession from Sir John Hobhouse, in his capacity as president of the Board of Control, for one student writership, a scholarship that allowed the QCC College Council to create a special examination to select one QCC student for entry to Haileybury College, the East India Company training school.Footnote ⁶⁰ Lord Clarendon believed a dedicated scholarship to facilitate a QU student from any of the colleges to be trained for the EIC would be “a great service to the Colleges” and “would perhaps not be displeasing” to the company.Footnote ⁶¹ Although this scheme only operated for one year, it proved so important that Kane boasted that “the competitive examinations for the Indian Civil Service had practically originated in this College, and were not likely to be now neglected.” On another occasion, he conjectured that the QCC scheme had provided a successful pilot project for subsequent reforms.Footnote ⁶² Jeremiah Moriarty, a Catholic who was awarded the honor, traveled to Haileybury for two additional years of training, and the prospect of a salary of £700. Newspapers across Ireland and England made note of Moriarty’s election, thus further publicizing the scheme and bolstering QCC’s prestige.Footnote ⁶³ Kane congratulated Moriarty, hoping his success would demonstrate to the general public what was possible for those with “literary and Scientific ability” along with “prudence, economy, and moral principle,” thus forecasting the likelihood of future imperial appointments and their place within the college’s own development.Footnote ⁶⁴

The exam to enter the ICS favored the study of English literature, history, and the constitution; various European languages (especially Greek and Latin); then mathematics, natural science, philosophy, and logic; and finally Sanskrit and Arabic.Footnote ⁶⁵ In order to facilitate the very best students interested in taking the exam, faculty at Cork and Belfast established a special training program. In Cork, this took the shape of a semi-private tutorial where students who had a reasonable prospect of success reviewed material related to the exam, all of which cost the student £1 in extra fees.Footnote ⁶⁶ In Belfast, the Council created a special competition to award prizes to encourage further student participation in preparing for the civil service exams.Footnote ⁶⁷ At some point in the 1850s all three institutions attempted to introduce the teaching of Sanskrit and Arabic. As one QCG professor noted, it was important that QC students had the same chance to earn the 375 points allotted to the language as students in England or Dublin.Footnote ⁶⁸ Although Belfast and Cork offered language lessons with the professors of Greek and Latin, no permanent appointment in non-Western language was made, unlike at TCD which introduced a permanent lecturer (later professor) of Sanskrit in 1859, as well as a chair in Arabic in 1855.Footnote ⁶⁹ The vice chancellor of QU, speaking before graduates in 1859, claimed that the institution hoped to award “an honour for special proficiency in Sanscrit,” and argued for the “great importance” of language acquisition for those “who may seek admission to the East Indian service.”Footnote ⁷⁰

The Parliamentary Commission of 1858 reported that the colleges were an unqualified success, precisely because the students had distinguished themselves in their examinations.Footnote ⁷¹ The competitive examinations thus became a means by which the QCs could measure their success: they were used as standard, scientific, mathematical proof of the benefits of united education. Because competitive examinations standardized the requirements for all those interested in the civil services, it also afforded a benchmark of measurement against other students and institutions. As a result, President Henry of QCB could boast that among the sixteen successful applicants, one had been first overall in his year, another in second place, two in fourth, one in sixth, one in tenth, and another in seventeenth. The exams were thus proof of the emergence of a cadre of Irishmen able to compete with British students, and therefore to contribute to the administrative and maintenance of governing the empire.

Once competitive examinations opened in 1855, the presidents of all three colleges paid specific notice to the success of Queen’s men in securing imperial appointments, both as a testament to the quality of education offered by the young colleges, as well as an example for Ireland’s growing middle classes to aspire to. The annual reports of each president listed those students who succeeded in the examinations to enter the Indian Civil Service, the Indian Medical Service, the Department of Public Works in India, the Consular Services, the Army Medical Service, the Navy Medical Service, and the Royal Engineers. The attention that administrators paid to these particular appointments suggests the importance of these positions to the overall success of the institutions. Thus, in the 1863 President’s Report from QCB, President Henry noted that since the establishment of competitive examinations, sixteen QCB alumni had secured positions, an example of “remarkable success” as students contended “with numerous competitors from the oldest and most renowned universities in the empire.” The point was to highlight “the admirable education imparted here, its adaptation to the wants of the community, the unflagging zeal and great ability of the Professors, and the energy and industry of the Students.”Footnote ⁷² This point was reinforced in a long memo from the secretary of QU, George Johnstone Stoney,Footnote ⁷³ to the chief secretary of Ireland preparing for a parliamentary inquiry into the QCs. Noting that in the short period of open examinations students from the QCs had obtained six appointments, Stoney argued that it proved a “greater measure of success than has fallen to the lot of any other University in the Empire.” He justified this opinion by noting that of the 72 appointments made to the ICS, QU, with its three colleges, had “on the whole obtained a larger measure of success in proportion to our members than any other University in the Kingdom.” Although his mathematics might be suspect (TCD did the best with eleven appointments), the table included in his report did demonstrate the disparity between the relative success of the six appointments by QU students versus Oxford’s twenty-six appointments among nineteen colleges and seven halls, and Cambridge’s sixteen places obtained by its seventeen constituent colleges.Footnote ⁷⁴

Students’ success securing lucrative appointments in the empire also served as a useful tool for QC presidents to wield in appealing to government for financial resources, better facilities, and expanded support in training for the needs of their students. QCG President Edward Berwick in his 1863–64 report pointed to five appointments to the ICS in the previous three years, along with a Ceylon writership, an appointment in the Indian Engineering Department, and several other minor appointments. This was despite, he intimated, the fact that most “with whom they have to contend for the high and profitable honours now open to the competition of the empire,” had the privilege of an elite and more robust education in the classics.Footnote ⁷⁵ For Berwick, and his colleagues, the dearth of secondary-level education—where students could begin their training in Greek and Latin—severely limited the horizons of students in third level, as professors lost valuable teaching time on rudimentary knowledge that students at TCD, Oxford, or Cambridge had acquired at an earlier age.Footnote ⁷⁶ All three colleges complained of the need for physical space to house tropical plants,Footnote ⁷⁷ to shelve the growing selection of volumes in their libraries,Footnote ⁷⁸ to expand campus museums to display materials often donated from alumni in the empire, or to expand teaching facilities as a result of the growing demand. These appeals did not go unacknowledged, but the government often compelled presidents to seek out benefactors to offset large building projects. Nevertheless, it was imperial appointments that demonstrated the ability, and potential, of Irish students to contribute to the empire, and it was imperial appointments that validated the QCs place in Ireland’s future and formed the basis of these demands for more government support.

Initial success in competitive examinations also proved useful in parliamentary debate, especially as expenditure on the QCs became an increasing focus of parliamentary opposition. The Catholic Church was effective in mobilizing opposition to the QCs by Irish MPs, especially Charles Owen O’Conor, known as the O’Conor Don, and John Pope Hennessy, who himself had been enrolled at QCC in the 1850s and graduated with a first.Footnote ⁷⁹ The O’Conor Don focused his ire against the QCs in May 1862, when he deemed the colleges as “failing institutions” propped up by government largesse that did not fit the purpose of providing education to the country’s Catholic population. To make his case, the O’Conor Don drew liberally on Pope Hennessy’s arguments, published in an 1859 pamphlet, about the small numbers of students enrolled in the colleges and how often the number of scholarships exceeded the number of qualified students, intending to call attention to the poor level of academic attainment among the student body, as well as the waste in government funds.Footnote ⁸⁰ Sir Robert Peel, the chief secretary of Ireland, responded to these attacks by highlighting the success of QC men in the competitive examinations and their contribution to the British Empire. He flipped the O’Conor Don’s accusations about poor value-for-money by spotlighting the relatively meager sums of money the government spent on student scholarships in comparison to the large endowments of Oxford, Cambridge, and TCD, before praising the QCs’ success in competition.Footnote ⁸¹ Referring to the recent publication of the Civil Service Commissioners report, Peel alluded to their statistics on the QCs, pointing out that the commissioners had made special note of the colleges’ success. Peel quoted at length from the report, emphasizing that Irish universities did very well, with thirteen successful candidates from TCD, five from QCB (including one coming in fourth place overall), and another from QCG. He contrasted these accomplishments with the eight candidates from Scotland, a statistic meant to emphasize the imbalance between the eight places secured from eight thousand Scottish students, versus the six places won among the QCs population of fewer than six hundred and fifty students. According to Peel, the commissioners’ report demonstrated both the advantage of maintaining educational establishments and universities in different parts of the UK as well as showing “that students educated in the Queen’s Colleges have profited by the opportunities placed within their reach.”Footnote ⁸²

This sort of boosterism became a reoccurring feature in the 1860s, whether in the individual presidents’ reports to Parliament, or the annual conferring of degrees at St Patrick’s Hall in Dublin Castle, faithfully reported in newspapers. Every autumn, the university body assembled, often led by the lord lieutenant, along with the vice-chancellor of the university, the Senate, professors, and candidates for graduation. Amid the pomp and circumstance, officials brought imperial proofs of success front and center. Thus, in the first year after competitive examinations opened, the lord lieutenant praised the principle of meritocracy “as a fact established in the institutions of empire,” before highlighting the success of two QC students, “who have thus shown their pre-eminence” as well as the “useful character of the course of study.”Footnote ⁸³ The next year, Lord Carlisle again praised “the rising youth of Ireland” by spotlighting the performance of John Allen Millar, of QCB, for receiving first place in competition for admission to the Royal Military Academy.Footnote ⁸⁴ By 1860, Carlisle was praising multiple students for admission into the ICS and connecting it to the “justice, liberality, and toleration” upon which the university had been founded. Addressing the graduates of QU in 1866, the Anglo-Irish conservative lord lieutenant, Lord Abercorn, paused to note the accomplishments of many who had obtained places through competitive examinations in India—stating there was “[no] finer field for exertion than is afforded by our Indian Empire”—and stressing the possibilities that lay ahead for Irishmen to avail themselves of “opportunities of entering upon, in common with your countrymen all over the Empire, the race of excellence and distinction.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Lord Carlisle neatly summed up the aspirational hopes of what the QCs represented for Ireland when he claimed that the eminence of the professors, “the elevated standard of the examinations,” “the practical results exhibited at the competitive ordeals,” the graduates’ employment in not only the civil service but “more expressly, the Indian service,” placed QU on “the most unassailable foundation.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The hope evident in Carlisle’s pronouncement, however, began to crumble in the 1870s, as the Catholic Church demanded reform and appointments in the ICS appeared to dry up.

The Risk of Being “Hibernianised”?Footnote ⁸⁷ Civil Service Reforms and the Death of the Queen’s University

Ultimately, two changes significantly constrained the QCs, their role in imperial administration via the ICS, and the success of their alumni: the so-called Salisbury reforms of 1876; and the transformation of QU into the Royal University of Ireland (RUI) in 1879. Although these events were not directly connected—pressure for these changes came from different constituent groups—they occurred nearly concurrently and were the result of long-standing campaigns for reform. Despite having different origins, they reveal a set of overlapping concerns about the role of higher education in society, Ireland’s future within broader imperial structures, and ultimately which citizens possessed the capacity to govern.

According to Scott Cook, by the 1880s the number of Irishmen successfully gaining entry in the ICS hovered around 5 percent, having dropped from a high of 33 percent in 1857, and roughly 25 percent during the 1860s.Footnote ⁸⁸ The reasons behind this decline were both increased prospects for middle-class careers within the United Kingdom, as well as two reforms to the Civil Service examinations in 1864 and 1872, which reduced the maximum testing age from 21 to 19 and tinkered with the allocation of marks.Footnote ⁸⁹ Whereas the original assumption in adopting competitive examination was that the most industrious, intelligent, morally upright, and well-heeled of British society would gain a commission, detractors argued that rather than selecting “the very ablest men” examinations had simply selected the “cleverest and sharpest boys” who lacked the physical and moral character necessary to govern.Footnote ⁹⁰ While changes to the exam were not simply the result of anti-Irish prejudice, it is no coincidence that criticism in the popular press included how well Irish men did in the examinations and the grave portent it held for the future of the empire. In 1865 the Pall Mall Gazette reported that it was “a remarkable fact that at these examinations Irishmen are beginning to beat both Englishmen and Scotchmen.” This should give rise to “grave reflection both as to the soundness of our scheme and its probable result,” it argued.”Footnote ⁹¹ In the words of the English bureaucracy builder, Edwin Chadwick, the Indian Empire would not tolerate being “governed by an handful of their equals. [British] powers consists in our being essentially different from them, and their belief in our moral superiority only.”Footnote ⁹² The Saturday Review stressed that Irishmen did not meet this standard and were “unfit to govern a strange country” due to the fact they carried with them everywhere their “religious prejudices” and were “always to be mastered by any one adroit enough to use them.”Footnote ⁹³

As government officials debated what shape reform might take, some defended the importance of including Irish participation. In 1876, Parliament published Papers relating to the Selection and Training of Candidates for Indian Civil Service, a roughly 300-page document that laid bare the competing logics in attempts to reform the selection process, including debate about the entry age, concerns over pay, and whether the ICS required university educated men of a particular social standing.Footnote ⁹⁴ While men connected to Oxbridge, such as Dr Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol College, Oxford, suggested that government should adopt a scheme to train recruits exclusively at Cambridge and Oxford, others stressed how “it would be undesirable to show … a greater preference for English than to the Scotch or Irish Universities and colleges” and officials at TCD made a plea to include it as a residential site for training men.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Indian Office solicited opinions from their men on the spot, many of whom stressed the damaging effects a system that mandated residency at Oxford or Cambridge might have on recruits, notwithstanding the desire to attract university educated men. Writing from the NW Province of Nainital, the future member of the Council of India, Charles Crosthwaite complained about any proposed changes, writing: “I depreciate any plan which might exclude the men we get from the Irish and Scotch Universities, who are often among the ablest in the service.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The historian and administrator, Wilton Oldham, noted that the best public servants had been university men trained in England, Scotland, and Ireland, while others demanded that Scottish and Irish universities “should be recognised” in any arrangement.Footnote ⁹⁷ Thus, for many connected to Indian administration, the nationality of men was never a problem—an Irishman was just as able to administer a province as someone from Scotland or England—rather, what mattered was a candidate’s maturity and moral character, attributes often connected to the benefits of university education.

However, the quality of education, and the subjects taught, also became a point of contention and one where the criticism of “cramming” was leveled.Footnote ⁹⁸ Newspapers referenced the “terror of the ‘crammed Irishman’” so successful in the competitive examinations but unable to compete with the social standing of England’s hallowed universities.Footnote ⁹⁹ Attuned to this particular criticism, the president of QCB wrote in his 1862 Presidential Report of the breadth and depth of the curriculum and how well it prepared candidates for the civil service. The institution’s “system of general education,” he claimed, was not designed merely “to cram the candidates before going up for examination.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Sir Robert Kane also defensively referred to the need to guard against cramming—especially the narrowing of subjects for students interested in going up for competitive exams—and instead promoted the broad-based QCC curriculum.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The important point for all the presidents of the QCs was the residential nature of their programs, a key difference from the University of London model that was strictly an examining body. The importance of campus life—of intellectual life, an esprit de corps—was a key feature in the debate about the reform of selecting candidates for the ICS. Kieran Flanagan has argued that the 1876 reforms were stimulated by fears that the ICS had lost its prestigious cachet as recruits saw little prospect of promotion, and domestic opportunities became more appealing. Yet, crucially, the effects of the changing regulations included the favoring of young men of means (especially those connected to public schools) and “reflected the view that Scotland and Ireland were to be removed from effective competition” for ICS positions.Footnote ¹⁰²

There is good reason to believe that Irish universities—both the University of Dublin and QU—would have survived changes to the selection of candidates for the ICS and other branches of imperial service. There was plenty of discussion across the UK about the “merits of our countrymen” working in India, or their continued success in “the important competitive examinations for places in the public service.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This was especially true of the QCs, where success in the competitive examinations continued to serve as testament to the success of the colleges in Irish society. Rather than changes to the procedures for selecting candidates for the ICS, what significantly hampered the QCs place in imperial service was the onslaught of the Irish Catholic hierarchy in its quest for a Catholic degree-granting university. Although the Catholic University of Ireland had been established by Pope Pius IX in 1854, it could not confer degrees and technically was illegal as Catholics were proscribed from teaching any arts subjects apart from those delivered at Maynooth, which was strictly for educating clergy. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, the Catholic hierarchy made entreaties to the British government to grant the Catholic University the authority to grant degrees, which included the proposition of a charter in 1866, and an attempt to give QU the ability to issue degrees on behalf of students enrolled at the Catholic University, which was bitterly opposed. Opposition to meddling with the make-up of QU revolved around the same principles that animated debate with its creation—the benefits of united education and the imperative of preventing the perils of “ecclesiasticism in any shape,” which would promote the sectarianism that made Ireland “a bye-word among the nations … from the standpoint of [its] bigotry and intolerance.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Protest mattered little, and ultimately Disraeli’s government passed the University Education (Ireland) Act in 1879 as part of a wider set of reforms toward Ireland, creating a new degree granting institution—the RUI—that received support from the Catholic hierarchy, thus killing QU.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The RUI adopted the University of London model, which meant it was an examining institution with no residency requirements, giving students affiliated with any number of colleges (including those associated with the Catholic University) the freedom to take examinations for a degree.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This had an incredibly damaging effect on the three QCs by pushing down enrollment while simultaneously eroding the academic rigor that had been associated with the residential nature of QU. Professors at the QCs feared for the future, sure that the nonresidential nature of the RUI would see their “pupils diminish in number,” leading to less fees and the erosion of maybe “half their income.” The nonresidential requirements of the RUI also exposed the tension between knowledge and learning, or between the examination body of the university and the teaching imparted by professors on college campuses. This was part of a debate that raged across the UK during the 1860s–1880s and was particularly relevant to ICS appointments who expressed the necessity for an esprit de corps, which was lacking since the closure of Haileybury College.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ According to the president of QCC, William Sullivan, this move toward a nonresidential and exam-based education meant that an “examination fever” had “so penetrated and enfeebled” the student’s mind, and “extinguished any germs of enthusiasm for knowledge for its own sake,” that he “has no thought for anything that does not directly ‘pay’.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The president of QCG, Thomas Moffett, was more sanguine but nevertheless urged that it behooved the RUI to facilitate exams that promoted “the aspirations of a liberal curiosity” rather than simply “the loading of memory with the mere results of knowledge rapidly accumulated … and rapidly forgotten.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Hostility to the QCs continued to bubble up among members of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in the 1880s. In the 1884 session of Parliament, Justin McCarthy and Timothy Healy criticized the QCs, particularly Cork and Galway, for their flagging enrollments and expense, which had precipitated the convening of the (rather leadingly entitled) Commission into the Well-being and Efficiency of Queen’s Colleges in Ireland.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Rather than publish one report, the Commission split and published two separate reports disagreeing largely along political lines about the standard of education at the QCs and the number of RUI students attending the colleges. The minority report, issued by the president of the Commission, the barrister Richard P. Carton QC, and the rector of the Catholic University, Dublin, Gerald Molloy DD, castigated the QC’s academic standing by pointing to the very few who matriculated in the first years of the RUI, suggesting that RUI students refused to attend the QCs due to their “conscientious objections,” thus rehashing the old exclusionary demands by the Catholic hierarchy of the moral peril of their Catholic flock attending any “godless” college.Footnote ¹¹¹ The majority report disputed these conclusions and, notwithstanding a number of recommendations for the improvement of the colleges, argued that the quality of education at all three was “satisfactory” and that its professors were of a very high class and eminent in their fields.Footnote ¹¹²

One of the main points raised by both the majority report and sympathetic witnesses was the “honours and distinctions” alumni from the QCs had won, “particularly in connexion with the numerous examinations that have been for many years open to public competition.”Footnote ¹¹³ The commissioners listed with satisfaction all the men who had attained great appointments, noting the “21 who have obtained appointments by competition in the Indian Civil Service (which is thought to have been practically closed to Irish students for several years by recent regulations), 12 others who have obtained appointments in India and Ceylon, 4 of them in engineering, and 18 who have obtained, generally by competition, appointments in other services abroad.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Witnesses noted that before the eradication of QU (euphemistically referred to as “the disturbance”) the QCs “could challenge comparison with any student … in examinations for the East India Service,” that the positions taken “in the Indian examinations … accords with the fact that they have received a very high intellectual culture,” or that the quality of education “is seen on looking into the Calendars of the Queen’s University, records of the merits of the Queen’s Colleges.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Alumni of QCC organized a meeting directly before the commissioners arrived to take testimony in Cork, protesting against any potential diminution of the college’s endowment considering the marked success in “the public service through examinations in which they competed with students from every part of the United Kingdom.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Galway Express neatly summed up local feelings after the Commission’s time in town, praising QCG as a “popular institution” that had done much to develop the town economically. But, what set the institution apart was that “fellows of different creeds and classes” had achieved success, especially “in the army and navy medical services and Indian civil [exams].”Footnote ¹¹⁷ For the Express, nonsectarian education had achieved its social and political aims—Irish men, free from religious bigotry, demonstrating their utility as productive imperial citizens.