Church, state and social science in Ireland

Knowledge institutions and the rebalancing of power, 1937–73

Peter Murray, Maria Feeney

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526121721
  9781526100788
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526108074
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

The immense power the Catholic Church once wielded in Ireland has considerably diminished over the last fifty years. During the same period the Irish state has pursued new economic and social development goals by wooing foreign investors and throwing the state's lot in with an ever-widening European integration project. How a less powerful church and a more assertive state related to one another during the key third quarter of the twentieth century is the subject of this book. Drawing on newly available material, it looks at how social science, which had been a church monopoly, was taken over and bent to new purposes by politicians and civil servants. This case study casts new light on wider processes of change, and the story features a strong and somewhat surprising cast of characters ranging from Sean Lemass and T.K. Whitaker to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and Father Denis Fahey.

1

Introduction

Knowledge, they say, is power. One manifestation of the power of the Catholic Church within the independent Irish state in the middle decades of the twentieth century was the virtual monopoly its clergy and the educational institutions under their control possessed over the discipline of sociology. The first university posts in this discipline were filled in 1937, the year in which the voters of the twenty-six-county state ratified a new constitution that blended Anglo-American liberal democratic norms with distinctive new provisions reflecting Catholic teaching. Verbal genuflection before the social prescriptions of papal encyclicals was to found in this document although, as Joe Larragy (2014: 201) notes, ‘Catholic social power rather than Catholic social teaching was the prevalent factor in the Irish case and for a long time the formula suited an authoritarian church in a parsimonious state dominated by the rural petit bourgeoisie.’ But times, churches and states change. In 1973, when both parts of Ireland entered what was then the European Economic Community (EEC), a secular, professional association of Irish sociologists was also founded.

In this book the rebalancing of power between Church and state in the period between 1937 and 1973 is explored through a case study of the Irish knowledge institutions that engaged in social science teaching and research. Here the aspect of the Catholic Church of greatest relevance is what John Whyte (1980: 16–21) termed the ‘grip on education of unique strength’ it possessed within the southern Irish state. Securing this grip was a great reservoir of clerical person power and a laity hierarchically mobilised and disciplined by devotional innovation and institutional expansion (Mac Giolla Phadraig 1995; Inglis 1998). Leading a movement that constituted the most significant source of popular pressure on that educational system, Gaelic League President Douglas Hyde in 1906 wrote that ‘they [the priests and the church] are always on the spot, they have the women behind them, they can do almost what they like’.¹ The critically important feature of the southern Irish state is its developmental strategy shift from the late 1950s. At this time an uncoupling of public policy from the cultural, political and religious aspirations that fuelled the nationalist struggle for Irish self-government and shaped government policies in the early decades of independence took place. Newly installed at the centre of the state’s project were membership of the EEC, the attraction of export-orientated investment from transnational corporations and the gearing of education to create a labour force that met the requirements of such investors.

With the new state’s activism in the education field mainly channelled into attempts to revive the Irish language (Akenson 1975), the southern Irish educational system that began to be transformed in the 1960s was up to that point very largely unchanged from the form in which it had been inherited from the now truncated United Kingdom. It is therefore with the United Kingdom of the 1801–1922 period and the manner in which its governments struggled with, and eventually settled, the Irish University Question that examination of Irish sociology’s origins needs to begin.

Churches and the British state in Irish higher education

According to Boylan (1999: 1) ‘[T]‌he two most significant developments in Irish education during the course of the 19th century were the creation of a national system of primary education in the early 1830s, and the establishment of the Queen’s Colleges at Belfast, Cork and Galway in the mid 1840s.’ Underlying government educational reform efforts were the principles of denominationally mixed education within a hierarchically integrated national structure. Opposed to them were the denominational agendas of the Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian Churches. In the university case, Ireland already had the University of Dublin with its single college (Trinity) and its alignment for more than two and a half centuries with the established Anglican Church. The Queen’s Colleges were therefore intended to cater for Catholics and, in the Belfast case, for Presbyterians. Within both these churches opinion was divided as to the acceptability of the new creations. In the Catholic case concessions were sought from and refused by the government before Rome came down on the side of the scheme’s opponents. With the Presbyterians, acceptance won the day, although a college (Magee) analogous to the Catholic national seminary, St. Patrick’s College Maynooth, in the complete control that the General Assembly exercised over it, was also established in Derry. Having rejected the Queen’s Colleges, the Catholic bishops founded a Catholic University in Dublin in 1854, appointing a high-profile English convert from Anglicanism, John Henry Newman, as its first Rector. Newman’s Idea of a University lives on as a monument to his time in Dublin but, hamstrung by lack of endowments and an absence of recognition for its degrees, the university in the form in which it was founded could not flourish. Disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 was followed by the passage in 1872 of Fawcett’s Act, which removed all religious tests from Dublin University. The effect of this change was to make Trinity College even less acceptable to the Catholic hierarchy than it had previously been. In their eyes it now resembled the Queen’s Colleges in its godlessness and the first version of the Irish Catholic Church’s ‘Trinity ban’ dates from this time. As originally formulated in 1875, and reaffirmed by the Maynooth Synod in 1927, this prohibited Catholic clerics from advising or facilitating students in any way to go to Trinity College (Burke 1990).

Religion versus scientific rationalism

During the 1860s a new factor further complicated the Irish University Question – the rise in Britain of scientific rationalism or Huxleyism. An intellectual movement that increasingly became a professional network as its leading adherents acquired a growing number of academic posts throughout the British Empire (Jones 2001:190–191; O’Leary 2012: 40–41), Huxleyism promoted a reform of scientific education ‘which required that the older universities move away from their original character as religious foundations for the training of clergymen and that the curriculum in “sensitive subjects”, in particular those which touched on Creation and on human origins, be rid of the influence of theology’ (Jones 2001: 189). In August 1874 one of Huxley’s closest associates, the Irish-born John Tyndall, delivered a Presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Belfast in which ‘he exhorted his fellow scientists to “wrest from theology the entire domain of cosmological theory”’ and ‘envisaged “the mild light of science” as a powerful liberating influence on the youth of Ireland, and as an effective bulwark against any future “intellectual or spiritual tyranny” which might threaten the welfare of Irish society’ (O’Leary 2012: 30; Brown 2005). In October the Irish hierarchy issued a pastoral letter that responded to Tyndall and presented his views as a vindication of their demands for Catholic clerical control over the environment in which Catholics received their higher education that the government had rejected when the Queen’s Colleges were established. Tyndall’s speech was influenced by what he perceived to be the neglect of science at the Catholic University in Dublin (O’Leary 2012: 30). The failure of the Devonshire Commission to recommend funding for the Catholic University’s science faculties had in the same year prompted a Catholic periodical, The Tablet, to comment that ‘denied endowment and legal recognition, the Catholic University, should, in the opinion of the Royal Commission found and endow chairs open to Messrs. Carpenter, Tyndall, Huxley and Herbert Spencer and all the scientific rationalists of the day’ (quoted in Jones 2001: 192).

To sociologists one name stands out here – that of Herbert Spencer, who normally commands a place in any wide-ranging treatment of the classical nineteenth- and early twentieth-century age of sociological theory (e.g. Coser 1977: 88–127; Ashley and Orenstein 1990: 141–171) and is usually the only English theorist to do so. Spencer (1820–1903) was a political Liberal – later a Liberal Unionist – with a strong leaning towards the minimal role of government favoured by laissez-faire economists. His social background was that of provincial English Dissenting Protestantism and in his working life he was at various times a railway engineer, an inventor and a journalist. His social circle included leading British natural scientists of his day and aspects of his evolutionary theory of social development are said to have anticipated the biological theory of the evolution of animal species put forward by Charles Darwin, whose work was publicly championed and popularised by T. H. Huxley. Like Huxley, Spencer embraced the agnosticism which, despite its limited appeal in Ireland, was a recurring preoccupation among and a regular target of attack for Irish Catholic writers (O’Leary 2012: 77–80). Spencer never held an academic post but The Tablet’s reference to the possibility that he might was, as we will see, not to be the last made to him in the course of Irish university controversies.

The Royal University and the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction

At the end of the 1870s new legislation ushered in a major reorganisation of Irish university education. The three Queen’s Colleges were under the direction of the Dublin-based Queen’s University, whose Senate ‘not only had complete control over examinations leading to degrees and diplomas but prescribed the courses that students must follow in the colleges before they might present themselves for these examinations’ (Moody and Beckett 1959: 225). This was now abolished and replaced in 1882 by the Royal University. Following the London model, this was an examining body whose examinations were taken by students of the Queen’s Colleges, of Magee and of the now renamed Catholic University – in all of which the Royal University funded fellowships – as well by students from a variety of other colleges and individuals pursuing private study. As Moody and Beckett (1959: 289) note, ‘the principle that public money must not be used to subsidise sectarian colleges was at last abandoned, though not openly or explicitly’. At the same time ‘the fellowship system rescued the catholic University College [Dublin] from a situation that had become desperate and started it on a new career in which it quickly became the rival of the Queen’s Colleges for the rewards of the Royal University’. The Senate of the Royal University was, like the Boards which presided over primary and secondary schooling, ‘balanced’ with an equal number of Protestant and Catholic members. Unloved on either side of the divide, the Royal University nonetheless survived for nearly three decades as the period of Unionist ‘killing Home Rule by kindness’ passed without any new university education initiative.

That period did, however, witness important changes in the organisation of Irish science, within whose development three broad historical strands have been distinguished. The first has been variously termed the Anglo-Irish or Ascendancy strand. Its practitioners were drawn from the island’s Protestant social elite and its practice had predominantly the character of a cultural accomplishment rather than that of a set of activities with practical, economically relevant applications (Yearley 1989: 319–320). Here Irish prominence within nineteenth-century astronomy is cited as a case in point. Trinity College, the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) and the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) were the institutional embodiments of this scientific strand. During the nineteen century a second ‘administration’ strand emerged. Here a set of science and arts institutions were taken over (mainly from the RDS) or newly established by the state. Initially the institutions concerned came under the control of a London-based department but, from the creation in 1899 of a Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI) for Ireland, they were ‘now being administered as a group by the new department as instruments for the general improvement of Irish science’ (N. Whyte 1999: 13). Most of this group clustered around the Leinster House headquarters of the RDS, and to their activities the DATI during its lifetime added new agricultural and fisheries research facilities. The state employees staffing these bodies were mainly English. Other functions of the DATI were to fund scientific and technical instruction in secondary schools and, working with the local authorities created or democratised by the 1898 Local Government Act, to found technical schools supported by a combination of centrally provided funds and local rates. The Technical Instruction Committees which proliferated after 1900 were, as we will see, to survive the department that stimulated their formation. A third strand in Irish science was that of Nationalist scientists, mainly drawn from the Catholics who comprised a majority of the population but a small minority of its scientific community (Finnegan and Wright 2015). The creation of the National University of Ireland in 1908 provided this strand with its major institutional base and it is to this final chapter of the story of the Irish University Question within the politics of the United Kingdom that we now turn.

The University Question settled?

After two Royal Commissions had investigated different aspects of Irish higher education in the 1900s, Liberal Chief Secretary James Bryce unveiled the government’s reform proposals in January 1907. These envisaged the ‘enlargement of the University of Dublin so as to include, as well as Trinity College, the Queen’s Colleges of Belfast and Cork and University College, Dublin with Maynooth, Galway and Magee as “affiliated institutions”’ (Moody and Beckett 1959: 381). Bryce, however, was on the point of leaving Ireland and the task of putting new legislation on the statute book fell to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sociology and the Catholic social movement in an independent Irish state
• 3 Facing facts: the empirical turn of Irish Catholic sociology in the 1950s
• 4 US aid and the creation of an Irish scientific research infrastructure
• 5 The institutionalisation of Irish social research
• 6 Social research and state planning
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index