An exasperated Augustine Birrell in 1912 described national teachers as bearing ‘the scars of their profession – vanity and conceit, and an even stronger dash of unscrupulousness than is usually to be found outside the criminal classes’ (Puirséil, p. 43). In the 1980s I.N.T.O. members threatening industrial action described themselves in song as ‘the gentle, angry teachers’ (p. 174). Run these two descriptions past anybody who attended an Irish national school between the 1920s and the 1980s, and watch them smile. In this lively history Niamh Puirséil demonstrates that the story of the I.N.T.O. is – more or less – a history of middling, mainly Catholic Ireland before and after independence. (There are also two chapters on the teachers’ union in Northern Ireland.) In independent Ireland national teachers were hard-working, under-appreciated, and for most of this period squirming under the authority of a church they both revered and resented, but rarely resisted. Their feelings towards the Department of Education were less ambiguous, but national teachers were disgracefully treated up to the 1960s. The union, however, replicated the values of the new state, barely protesting at the marriage ban against women teachers introduced in 1932, and at the even more devastating compulsory retiral at sixty which meant that no female teacher, regardless of marital status, could be eligible for the full pension. Women (over half of all national teachers) who tried to keep the union’s attention on these injustices in the succeeding decades were scornfully, even brutally, silenced. The I.N.T.O., like many other Irish institutions, stagnated between the 1940s and the 1970s; the marriage ban would probably never have been removed in 1958 had it not been for a widespread moral panic at falling population which prompted the Catholic church to support its removal. Rural depopulation continued, however, and the I.N.T.O. supported the closure of one- and two-teacher rural schools, which fell in number from 3,194 in 1962 to 900 in 1984. This writer knows of at least three teachers who left the I.N.T.O. because of this issue, but Puirséil does not seem to appreciate that arguments for the retention of such schools could be based upon anything other than local sentiment. Also, her claim that all the daily newspapers except the Irish Press supported the teachers’ strike in 1946 makes little sense when one realises that the circulation of the Irish Times (quoted regularly in this book) was about 20 per cent that of the Irish Press. All in all, this is a lively book with many fascinating asides and gems, among them the reminder that the acclaimed apostle of modernisation, Gay Byrne, kept up a strong radio campaign in the early 1980s against women teachers going on maternity leave.

The other book under review is an edited collection of Seamus Heaney lectures given in the autumn and winter of 2015. The book’s title is perhaps a little too broad; one of the contributions is not about Ireland at all, and only one refers to the period before 1800. James Kelly attributes the comparatively high take-up of schooling before 1831 to the sheer volume of educational textbooks (mainly in English and mathematics) produced or reproduced in Ireland from the early eighteenth century; Bowen’s Complete spelling book, as produced by John Ferrar, was available in small Munster and Leinster towns (Rathkeale, Birr) by the early 1770s. Nicholas Wolf’s article on national schooling and the Irish language, which contains much meticulously-graphed research, suggests that monoglot Irish-speakers were not really that affected by Anglophone national schooling, because there were not that many national schools in monoglot Irish language areas anyway, up to the 1850s.

Ciaran O’Neill argues that fee-paying European schools and education generally (governesses come into the story) for nineteenth-century upper-middle-class people were cosmopolitan and transnational rather than national, although he uses the term ‘elite’ without defining clearly what he means by it. (Was horse-dealer’s daughter, Kate O’Brien, who attended such a boarding school, one of the ‘elite’?) David Fitzpatrick’s article, which argues that the late nineteenth-century national school network played a key role in rearing a generation of revolutionaries, is a model of clear, pellucid writing. Catherine Burke’s engagingly-written contribution proposes a montage approach to historical research, which this reader found quite inspiring, and went on to argue that school architecture in England in the first half of the twentieth century was designed to develop children’s imaginations. (A comparative study of Irish school architecture cries out to be written.)

Judith Harford and Tom O’Donoghue’s fascinating oral history of people who experienced secondary schooling in Ireland before 1967 – some nuns consciously prepared girls for careers, not all Christian Brothers were violent, cycling 10–12 miles to school in all weathers was the norm – would have been better had they not spent (literally) pages in preamble explaining why they used people’s own stories in their research. Oral history has become quite a respectable method of historical research and there is no longer any need to apologise for it. Audrey Bryan’s article on the background to, and unfulfilled promises of, the free secondary schooling introduced in 1967, points out (among other things) that vocational/trade education was almost completely neglected. My own research found letters to Irish women’s magazines in the late 1960s arguing that the enthronement of academic education could result in the downgrading of trades. Bryan also argues that providing free secondary schooling on its own was not enough to ensure educational equality.

All in all, this is a worthwhile collection of articles but, sadly, the editors’ introduction, which could be a useful survey of the historiography of Irish education, is almost unreadable. Here is a representative sentence: ‘This is not to suggest that an approach that prioritized the history of institutions, that was disposed to personalize the achievement of individuals, and that, in independent Ireland at least, located education securely within an ideological paradigm that conceived of the history of education as a leitmotiv for the history of the “nation”, was methodologically or interpretatively unsound.’ (p. 15)