one is amazed by the fact that no combined effort on the part of more
fortunate citizens has been made toward bringing about a wholesome change,
and this amazement is only lessened by the extraordinary freedom we in
Dublin enjoy from robberies, peculations, from crimes of violence and other
misdeeds that would sharpen our perception of miseries now borne with a
fortitude and a self-restraint that cannot but appeal strongly to any who,
either from personal experience or philanthropic reading, know how crime
and vice are associated elsewhere with conditions not more distressing and
often less long-lived than ours."[16]

SCHOOL CLOSED

There's small chance for the Irish to better their condition through
education. Many Irish children don't go to school. It is estimated that out
of 500,000 school children, 150,000 do not attend school. Why not? Here are
two reasons advanced by the Vice-Regal Committee on Primary Education,
Ireland, in its report published by His Majesty's Stationers, Dublin, 1919:

Many families are too poor.

England does not encourage Irish education.

Irish poverty is recognized in the school laws; the Irish Education act
passed by Parliament in 1892 is full of excuses for children who must go to
work instead of to school. Thousands of Irish youngsters must avail
themselves of these excuses. Ireland has 64,000 children under the age of
14 at work. But Scotland with virtually the same population has only
37,500.[17]

Eight-year-old Michael Mallin drags kelp out of a rush basket and packs it
down for fertilizer between the brown ridges of the little hand-spaded
field in Donegal.

"Is there no school to be going to, Michael?"

"There do be a school, but to help my da' there is no one home but me."

The act says that the following is a "reasonable excuse for the
non-attendance of a child, namely, ... being engaged in necessary
operations of husbandry."[18]

Ten-year-old Margaret Duncan can be found sitting hunched up on a doorstep
in a back street in Belfast. Her skirt and the step are webbed with threads
clipped from machine-embroidered linen, or pulled from handkerchiefs for
hemstitching. A few doors away little Helen Keefe, all elbows, is scrubbing
her front steps.

"But school's on."

"Aye," responds Margaret, "but our mothers need us."

The act plainly states that another reasonable excuse is "domestic
necessity or other work requiring to be done at a particular time or
season."[19]