Thomas Orde, 1746–1807

The old Gaelic order of poets, bards and patronage was gone. Any hope of a Catholic revival ended in 1745 with a failed Stuart rebellion. The world of the ‘file’ (poet), the Brehon, the man of learning, art, poetry, whose history as an established and cultured class going back to pagan Ireland was now vanquished and all over. The Irish language was retained only by the provincial peasant classes; the Irish aristocracy were all gone, and from that viewpoint Ireland was leaderless.

In the eighteenth century, the effect of the penal laws was to confine Irish education to the pay schools. A handful of proselytizing schools had survived from the time of Henry VIII but the vast majority of the Irish people who did have some kind of formal education attended the pay schools. They were mainly Catholic in nature, but there were also Dissenter pay schools, such as Presbyterian.

The backdrop to the social aspects of Irish history during this period, and taking education as one aspect of concern for the British state in Ireland, was that a concept like education was, in reality, a micro-site of power that became colonized or adapted into the changing rationale of government and became an element in the various technologies of government aimed at managing populations. While some historians suggest the range of possible motivations for the involvement of the British state in Irish education ranged from altruism to exploitation,¹ in the context of this book the British state established a national education system in Ireland as a social technology, which aimed to create predictable patterns of behaviour on the part of the individual and the general populace.² Thomas Orde was a cog within that process; it was he who initiated the process, and by initiating the process the state, through subsequent inquiries merged into the field of education, and in this manner legitimized the education of the poor in Ireland as an objective of government. Orde’s plan of 1787 was the first suggestion of a centralized system of education in the country and, while it was not implemented, it represented the first attempt by the state to directly intervene in educational matters, notwithstanding Tudor attempts of an earlier time. Orde’s involvement in education provision in Ireland, coupled with the subsequent series of inquiries demonstrate the ongoing legitimization of education as an object of government.

Ireland, in the eighteenth century, was a country of contrasts, squalor and splendour, poverty and prosperity. The poor ate potatoes and drank cheap whisky. Rioting was the result of food shortages. The famine of 1739 was a greater disaster proportionately than the famine of the 1840s. The landlord estate system of agrarian management meant that landowners were often the principal local decision-makers, and in contrast the Georgian period was one of wealth for landowners. They owned country mansions and town houses.

Roads, railways and canals were being built. Ireland only experienced the fringes of the Industrial Revolution, bar the north-eastern part of the island. These roads, railways and canals offered little by way of improvement to the circumstances of the general population. The pockets of the gentry and propertied classes were lined during the eighteenth century. Little wonder then that education was used at the end of the century and during the next as an agent in maintaining the status quo. The political, social and economic supremacy of a small but leading class was preserved. The growing attachment to things mechanical, technical and scientific throughout the eighteenth century is evidence of the ruling classes, the business people, viewing education as a tool, as a political and economic football with which to preserve and advance their own ends.

As the century wore on the Penal Laws were relaxed, and in the 1780s and 1790s repealed. Ascendancy and middle-class Ireland functioned mainly within the confines of the old Pale, with Dublin as its centre of power, and the city itself gaining in status within the Empire to become its second city. At the end of this century, the powers that be took it upon themselves an interest in educational matters.

Eighteenth-century Ireland, in the words of Lecky, was both ambivalent and inspirational. The likes of W. B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bowen imagined the era in the following terms: