A few words in defence of the University of Dublin.

  • Reginald Walter Macan
Date:
[1907?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A few words in defence of the University of Dublin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    A A MEASURE will be submitted to you on an early day for settling the question of University Education in Ireland. It will have for its object the advancement of learning in that portion of my dominions, and will be framed with a careful regard to the rights of conscience. So ran the most promising, or at least the most imposing, paragraph in the Queen’s Speech, at the opening of the Parliamentary session of 1873. It was the fifth session of the great Liberal supremacy under Mr. Gladstone’s first regime as Prime Minister. The year 1869 had witnessed the disestablishment of the Irish Church. The Irish Land Act of 1870 had initiated, for better and for worse, the abolition of the Irish landlords. After some three sessions devoted to the celebrated Education Act (1870), the Cardwell Army Scheme, and the Ballot Act, Mr. Gladstone returned, in 1873, to the case of Ireland, with a view to remove “ the third branch of the upas tree of poisonous ascendency,” such as he had described it in his speeches during the General Election of 1868. The Establish- ment was gone, the Landlords were going: what remained but to make an end of the University of Dublin ? On Thursday, February 13,the Prime Minister himself introduced the Irish University Bill in a speech of three hours’ duration. The speech was one of his oratorical triumphs for lucid exposition and mastery of detail. The Bill was at first received with apparent approval at least in the Liberal ranks, and the Premier was in high spirits at his achievement; it