Prometheus's Fire Abstracts
Chapter 7: Technical Education in Ireland 1870-1899 (Plunkett and the Recess Committee)
In the background to period covered author concentrates on obstacles
placed in way of technical education by dominant laissez-fairephilosophy
goverment. For example it was opposition from Liverpool Financial Reform
Association which killed the Model Agricultural Schools Most initiatives
were therefore via private benefaction-supported subscriptions.The author
outlines many such, including those by Bianconi in Clonmel and by Crawford
in Cork.
An important turning-point was the 1884 Royal Commission on Technical
Instruction (known as the Samuelson Commission) which laid the basis for
subsequent local government involvement, once this was established in
1898. Education in the principles underlying a trade was constructively
distinguished from 'learning a trade', thus getting round the 'laissez-faire'
objectors.
Important as this was, it was focused on England, and it took the 1895
Recess Committee, organised by Sir Horace Plunkett, to develop the political
leverage which arose from Samuelson, using for example the extraordinary
discrepancy in the public money spent on science, art and technical instruction
per head of population between England (over £3) and Ireland (one old
penny).
The Recess Committee (so called because it used the Parliamentary recess
to pull in the key politicians) met in the Dublin Mansion House, organised
to pick up experience from abroad, and produced a seminal report which
led eventually to setting up the Department of Agriculture and Technical
Instruction, with Plunkett in the lead. The author develops many interesting
themes relating to Home Rule politics and religion in this context; echoes
of these are to be found in the current (1999) arguments about the Good
Friday Agreement. The Recess Committee included Father Thomas Findlay,
the co-operative activist priest, and Rev Dr Kane, the Grand Master of
the Belfast Orange Lodge.
The Recess Committee and its work presents a pre-view of a great historical
'might-have-been': economic development under all-Ireland Home Rule, fuelled
by a thriving producer co-operative movement which depended for its growth
on technical competence.
The author in his conclusion calls for the role of Plunkett to be re-written
into history, and his full significance appreciated.
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