Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article, 

Cork Independent, 6 September 2012

Technical Memories (Part 28)

Changing Times

The twenty-second meeting of the Irish convention was held on Thursday 27 September 1917 in the Crawford Technical Institute. It was its first meeting in Cork. Sir Horace Plunkett took the chair. The discussion on the proposals for the future government of Ireland continued.

The escalation of war losses suffered by Irish Divisions during the Battle of the Somme in July 1917 and the devastating German U-boat sinking of British merchant shipping, distracted all sides from striving further towards a settlement. It was agreed on 25 September to submit further negotiations to a new sub-committee, a senior ‘Committee of Nine’ containing the most “important and capable figures”. This was one of the themes of the Cork visit. Months of deliberation later, the Convention’s final report agreed on in March 1918 was dealt a fatal blow. With the urgent need for military manpower on the Western Front, the government decided in April 1918 to simultaneously introduce Home Rule and apply conscription to Ireland, which was disagreed with.

By 1919 the Home Rule Bill of 1912 was out-of-date and a new Home Rule bill was devised. This stated that Ireland would govern itself within the Empire but in two separate parts – the south, and the six counties of the north. Each of the two parts would have a parliament in Dublin and Belfast and Ireland as a whole would still have MP’s representing them in Westminster. The bill became an act in 1920. The north accepted the act and in 1921, the King George V opened the parliament of the six counties at Stormont.

However, the south did not accept one part of the act. Those members of Sinn Féin who had been elected MP’s in the election in 1918, refused to take up their seats at Westminster. Instead, in January 1919, they established their own parliament (Dáil Éireann) in Dublin. They also declared an independent Ireland. It was around this time that the Irish Republican Army (founded from what had been the Irish Volunteers) started their campaign against any form of the British government in Ireland. This campaign was led by Michael Collins.

Amidst the changing political minefield of 1919, the consequences of the four year World War I (ended in 1918) was ever present and less and less money was put toward education. Despite this, discussions were still ongoing on how technical education could be improved. Last week, I presented the case of Arthur Sharman Crawford in 1917. At the fifteenth congress of Irish technical Instruction in early June 1919, two Cork based technical education practitioners, Sir Bertram Windle and Dr. John H. Grindley, principal of the Crawford Municipal Technical College, gave two papers on reasons why more funding was needed from Westminster. Copies of these papers can be read in Cork City and County Archives.

In the course of his address, Sir Betram Windle urged that “more reconstructive work and less criticism were desirable” in this country. Without satisfactory teachers, he declared, there would be no good teaching. The teachers should have fixity of tenure, fair salaries, and freedom from anxiety for old age. Their claim for fair salaries was a modest one, he noted, and applied to all classes of teachers, university, secondary, and elementary, as well as technical.

There were numbers of teachers spending long hours in instruction and much of their spare time in “improving their minds”, who did not get the wages of a carpenter or a miner, or any other kind of mechanics- not even that of a policeman. He was not suggesting that the classes of workers mentioned were overpaid but the man “who earned his bread mainly by his brain was just as much a working man as he who gained his living mainly by the sweat of his brow, and his claims were founded on justice and could not be resisted”. He emphasised the necessity for unity of the teaching profession, and said he should like to see it represented by a general educational association instead of separate organisations for the different branches.

Dr. John H. Grindley, Principal of the Crawford Technical Institute, read a paper on “What Technical Instruction can do for the Youth of Ireland”. He said it was becoming far too common to look upon technical teaching as some kind of special and intensive trade instruction quite secondary in importance to other branches in its true educative value. He mentioned the number of technical schools, often referred to as welfare schools, in existence and attached to works in the United Kingdom. There were 300 of them at that moment in time, which showed the value placed on technical training by larger industrial undertakings. The State, he noted, should see that day classes were established, which could be attended by boys during ordinary working hours. Six months later in December 1919, Dr. Grindley left for new pastures from Cork. On leaving to take up a new appointment in England, he was presented by the staff at the Crawford Technical Institute with a solid silver cake basket and Mrs Grindley was presented with a set of silver candle sticks.

To be continued….

Caption:

657a. First Dáil Éireann, 1919 (picture: Cork City Library)