ottom of the scale.

Meanwhile, obvious and urgent problems, which no Parliament but an Irish
Parliament can deal with, cry aloud for settlement. The Poor Law,
railways, arterial drainage, afforestation, are questions which I need
only refer to by name, confining myself to the greater issues.
Education, primary and intermediate, is perhaps the greatest. The
present system is almost universally condemned, and its bad results are
recognized. It has got to be reformed. By no possibility can it be
reformed so long as the Union lasts, not only because the Boards,
National and Intermediate, which control education, are composed of
unelected amateurs, but because there is no means of finding out what
the national opinion is as to the course reform is to take. Meanwhile
the children and the country suffer. The Intermediate Board is a purely
examining and prize-giving body, and its system by general agreement is
imperfect. In the National or Primary schools the percentage of average
daily attendance (71.1 per cent.), though slowly improving, is still
very bad.[59] Many of the school-houses are, in the words of the
Commissioners, "mere hovels," unsanitary, leaky, ill-ventilated. The
distribution of schools and funds is chaotic and wasteful. Out of 8,401
schools (in 1909-10)[60] nearly two hundred have an average daily
attendance of less than fifteen pupils. In 1730 the number is less than
thirty, and it is not only in sparsely inhabited country districts, but
in big towns, that the distribution is bad. The power of the
Commissioners to stop the creation of unduly small schools, and even
semi-bogus establishments which come into being in the great cities, is
imperfect. Another example of the curious mixture of anarchy and
despotism that the system of Irish government presents may be seen in
the Annual Report of the Commissioners. With a mutinous audacity which
would be laughable, if the case were one for laughing, the Commissioners
openly rail at the Treasury for the parsimony of its grants, and, in
order to stir its compassion, paint the condition of Irish education in
black colours. Imagine the various Departmental Ministers in Great
Britain publicly attacking in their Annual Reports the Cabinet of which
they were members! The Treasury, needless to say, is not to blame. It
pays out of the common Imperial purse all but a negligible fraction of
the cost of primary education in Ireland. Nothing is raised by rates,
and only L141,096