universities

universities. Although there are references to attempted foundations in Dublin in 1320 and 1358, Ireland's first university was Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), 1592. Although some of the Anglican elite continued even after its foundation to go abroad for higher education, the number was relatively small. Even in the second half of the 18th century Irish students enrolled in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge averaged only ten a year. By contrast Catholics and dissenters, formally excluded from TCD until 1793 and unwilling even after that date to submit to its Anglican ethos, were forced to look entirely outside Ireland, Catholics to the Irish colleges of continental Europe, and Presbyterians to the Scottish universities, especially Glasgow and Edinburgh.

From the late 18th century the demand for educational provision for Presbyterians in Ireland had led to the establishment of academies in several Ulster towns. Of these the Belfast Academical Institution was the most distinguished, yet its ambition to become a college for Presbyterians was frustrated by government resistance to denominational universities. Magee College, founded in Derry in 1865 under the terms of the will of Martha Maria Magee, was a Presbyterian college that included faculties of arts and theology. As an approved college it shared in the fellowships of the Royal University of Ireland, and on the dissolution of that body entered into an arrangement whereby Magee students could complete their degrees in TCD. Meanwhile the Presbyterian College, Belfast (‘Assembly's College’) (1853), catered for the theological training of Presbyterian students, who also followed courses in the newly established Queen's College, Belfast. Maynooth College, created in 1795 to provide for the training of Catholic priests in Ireland, initially included a school for the Catholic laity, but this closed in 1817.

The search for a form of university education acceptable to an increasingly assertive Catholic clergy and laity was to dominate policy‐making for the next 100 years. Catholic rejection of the Queen's Colleges was followed by the attempted establishment of an autonomous Catholic University. The Royal University of Ireland (1882) was another unsuccessful experiment, and numbers in the new colleges, apart from Belfast, remained low. Eventually the Irish Universities Act (1908) created two institutions, the Queen's University of Belfast and the National University of Ireland (NUI), while leaving TCD untouched.

After partition university education in Northern Ireland remained focused on Queen's. From 1945 increased funding and mandatory grants brought a considerable increase in numbers; in particular Catholic participation rose sharply, providing one seedbed for the growth of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Following the report of the Lockwood Committee on Higher Education (1965) a New University of Ulster, controversially located in predominantly unionist Coleraine rather than in largely nationalist Derry, was established in 1968. In 1984 it was merged with the Ulster Polytechnic (1971) and the Ulster College of Art to create the multi‐campus University of Ulster.

In the Republic of Ireland higher education, though significantly less well funded, also expanded rapidly from the 1950s, the number of full‐time university students rising from 6,796 in 1948–9 to 63,737 in equivalent institutions in 1998–9. Across that period the common perception of TCD and NUI as ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ institutions respectively largely disappeared. Following recommendations of the report of a Commission on Higher Education (1967), National Institutes of Higher Education were created in Limerick (1970) and Dublin (1976), both becoming universities in 1989. The NUI colleges at Dublin, Cork, and Galway and Maynooth College were granted independence in 1998; earlier, in 1968, government proposals (contrary to the commission's recommendations) for the merging of TCD and University College, Dublin, proved abortive.

Kenneth Milne