Maynooth, the ‘Godless colleges’ and liberal imperial thought in the 1840s

Abstract

In 1845, parliament passed an act establishing the three Queen’s Colleges in Ireland – Belfast, Galway and Cork – with the stipulation that ‘religious’ instruction in the colleges would have to be sponsored by voluntary organisations, not the state. Prior to 1845, parliament’s approach to providing spiritual guidance in state-run institutions had been one of ‘parallel patronage’, assuring that wherever there were individuals representing different denominational backgrounds, religious specialists from each denomination would be appointed to work in the institution. For example, the Prisons (Ireland) Act, 1826 required that Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican chaplains serve their respective portions of the prison population in each gaol that housed any of their co-denominationalists. But in 1845, parliament took an ostensibly different tack, implying that denominations would have to sponsor their young men’s study of theology or any other ‘religious’ subject at university level. However, this article argues that the Irish colleges bill gained assent from the liberal wing of parliamentary opinion precisely because it seemed, to early Victorian liberals, to instantiate the logic of parallel patronage. Using Thomas Wyse, Charles Buller, and T. B. Macaulay as cases in point, this article reveals that the logic behind this vision of state ‘neutrality’ as simultaneous support for each denominational interest was steeped in a working knowledge of colonialism.

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“…The intention was to provide non-denominational third level instruction in the provinces of Ireland and to also address the imbalance created by the fact that Trinity College Dublin catered largely for members of the established Anglican Church of Ireland at that time (Moody 1958). However, the secular ethos adopted by the three new provincial institutions led to them being labelled 'the godless colleges', and there was a conspicuous lack of support from the Catholic religious hierarchy right from the outset, and also subsequently during the early years of operation (Ó'Tuathaigh 1999; Adelman 2006Adelman , 2009Biel 2018). The construction and opening of the Queen's Colleges coincided with the Great Famine-a catastrophe that had a devastating impact in many areas of Ireland, including Galway (e.g.…”