During the last five years, Ireland has probably had more visitors from overseas than at any time in her history, and we who are Irish (like most citizens of small countries, we tend to be self-conscious) often wonder what impression they take away with them. Do they just see Ireland as a land of steaks and bacon and eggs, with slow trains and reckless car-drivers, or have they tried to find out what is going on, and indeed whether anything noteworthy is going on? Do they wonder whether this ancient but youthful country, which in the political sense came of age only a few years ago, is living a life and producing a culture of its own, is, in brief, making a contribution to Christian civilisation?

I have been interested in University Extension since 1915. But it was only a little over four years ago that circumstances combined to make a new scheme possible. Its success has been so astonishing—and the movement is destined to grow apace—that a brief explanation may be of general interest. It is hardly necessary to stress the importance of adult education for workers —and indeed for employers. It is absurd to suppose that men and women can be adequately equipped for life and for their social responsibilities while they are attending a primary school or are still in their teens. It is equally absurd to suppose that education teases when the boy or girl finally leaves school; the most influential part of education or miseducation continues through press, radio, cinema, and social intercourse. In our arithmetical democracy the real power lies ultimately not with the highly educated but with the mass of men and women with the minimum of formal education. I am not referring to technical training such as tradesmen receive; I mean education of human persons as such, particularly as regards social principles and current ideologies. Even for Catholics the Sunday sermon is not enough, nor even does the sodality suffice. What is required is a further education which will enter fully into men’s daily secular lives and deal with their responsibilities as citizens, as workers, as trade unionists. I think that we have now made a real beginning in Ireland. There are already over three hundred adult students, in ten centres, attached to University College, Cork; and next year, if we could cope with them, these numbers could be doubled.

The uneasy relationship between Irish writing and Irish myth a half-century ago may be seen in a controversy carried on by some leading Irish writers in 1899. It was concerned with the question of what the subjects of a national drama should be. To get the setting right one should recall that the year of the controversy was the year of the foundation of the Irish Literary Society, that the Abbey Theatre was still unborn and that a discussion about what directions an Irish dramatic movement might take must have seemed to most people outside the literary circle which had conceived it rather like a discussion between a newly-married couple about what profession their son would follow, if they had a child and if it was a boy and if he lived to become a man.

By that time, of course, the stimulating power of Irish myth and legend had been shown in the early work of Yeats and other poets of the Irish Literary Revival. The controversy began when John Eglinton, one of the best critics of the movement, suggested that this might not be the case with dramatists. ‘The ancient legends of Ireland undoubtedly contain situations and characters as well suited for drama as most of those used in the Greek tragedies which have come down to us’, he wrote, ‘but these subjects obstinately refuse to be taken out of their old environment and be transplanted into the world of modem sympathies. The proper mode of treating them is a secret lost with the subjects themselves.’

There are people with a bent for sacramental philosophy and theology who are always awestruck by the amount of earth that mixes with heaven in the Church of God. Heaven has truly folded all its gifts in tissues of earth, and we naturally marvel that heaven should have used the earth so much. There are even those who are scandalised into heresy by this, and begin to talk of God and the soul and the great alone. Yet, one could marvel just as much to see how earth has used heaven or how much the children of this generation have learned from the children of light.

The Church of God has been a great organisation since it emerged from the underground of pre-Constantine days. Genius such as that of Gregory the Great, Hildebrand, or the Tridentine popes, has contributed to the perfection of this organisation. Yet, remembering the lesser geniuses, one cannot but see that the hand of God was in it all—that wisdom of the most high that sweetly but strongly orders everything, the same wisdom which came to teach us the way of prudence. The very organisation of the Catholic Church has taught us a certain prudence. I do not speak of ordinary prudence, but of regnative prudence. How much of our international law was formed by a consideration of the prudence of that government which by force of its mission must be international and supernational.

The perfection of the parish-system, as we have it now, is due to the reforms of the Council of Trent.

Michail MacLiammoir has recently referred to the lack of visual sensitivity in the Irish people ‘whose ears had always been its strongest point of aesthetic perception’. Naturally, the storyteller’s art had been the only one to survive the long enslavement. Only the ‘Ascendancy’ had time or money to dabble in the fine arts, and the very nature of the ‘Ascendancy’ clan (those who collaborated with the ruling civil service appointed by England) led them to seek the most superficial portraits or stereotyped landscapes. Nevertheless, way back in our past we had a flourishing school of illuminators and sculptors, and it could not be held with much confidence that we are inherently colour-blind or immune to the suggestivity of lines or forms.

It is a fact worthy of reflection that Catholic clergy and people instinctively reacted against the lovely Georgian styles of architecture in which many of the towns and cities of Ireland were built during the past two centuries. For instance, the Hiberno- Romanesque style owes its popularity in no small degree to the fact that it resembles so little the Georgian manner and, of course, also because it revives the ancient pattern of Cormac’s chapel and other remains of the early Celtic era. It is also felt that the Royal Hibernian Academy carried with it into the 1920’s not only the taint of its origin as a facet of the life which revolved around the society of the Ascendancy, but possessed too, the air of decadence natural to an Irish society which by every artistic standard could only be judged as if it was situated in a suburb of London.