£5 for Catholic Child 195 for Protestant
From Our Belfast Correspondent Nearly a million pounds of public money in Northern Ireland is given over each year to buildings provided for state controlled schools, and about £400,000, in addition, is spent on rebuilding and improving schools that have transferred their debt of responsibility to the Government. The latter are largely centres for the trainof young Orangemen, The Catholic minority which supplies thirty-eight per cent. of the school popula tion is allowed £50,000. This sum was sanctioned grudgingly after the Catholics themselves had put up an equal sum.
The statements above were made by Mr. T. J. Campbell, K.C., M.P., the Nationalist leader, in the N. Ireland House of Cornmoos, in the course of a debate on the Education estimates.
His figures are startling enough without further delving into their intrinsic significance. Nevertheless it should be pointed out that they mean an expenditure of a mere £5 per annum on children educated in Catholic schools compared with £95 per annum on children attending non-denominational schools.
Mr. Campbell's complaint should have been readily appreciated in the light of his next remarks when he pointed out that in the Irish Free State Protestant schools were very fairly treated, as any clergyman would readily admit.
Criticising the teaching of " Bible-lessons" in Protestant schools, Mr. Campbell said that such education was, in effect, a waste of time and as a result of two generations of such teaching in the schools of Great Britain there were 30,000 people who never entered a church from one end of the year to the other.
The Grand Orange Lodge, he added, and non-Catholic churches in N. Ireland had their way with the government, and their schools were well provided for.