The Christian Brothers and the Civil Service
by S. O MATHUNA
1954, 40 per cent of the male secondary school pupils in this country
IN were
educated by the Christian Brothers. This percentage has not
altered substantially over the last twenty-five years: in 1930, it was 42
per cent.
It is common knowledge that a very large proportion of those in the
administrative, executive and clerical grades of the civil service found
their way there through the Christian Brothers' schools and, in order to
ascertain the size of that proportion, a survey was recently carried out
among practically the whole male staff of two government departments
and almost the whole clerical staff of another sub-department.
The
group surveyed, which totalled 163 persons, was divided as follows:
assistant secretaries 4, principal officers 1 1 , assistant principal officers 16,
higher executive officers 2 8 , administrative officers 4, executive officers
4 2 , staff officers 11, clerical officers 3 6 , others 3. Of this group [ 2 3 ,
or 75 per cent, received their secondary education from the Christian
Brothers.
T h e county composition of the group (by reference to the place where
secondary education was received) is somewhat surprising though there is
no obvious reason why it should not be representative of the civil service
as a whole. 8 0 , or 49 per cent, were from Dublin, 2 7 , or 17 per cent,
from Cork, 10 from Kerry, 6 from Tipperary, 5 each from Louth and
Galway, 4 each from Waterford, Westmeath and Wexford, 3 each
from Clare and Kilkenny. No other county had more than two representatives. 96 entered the civil service as clerical officers, 29 as executive
officers, 2 as administrative officers, 3 as officers of customs and excise,
7 as boy clerks and 26 through other grades. Of the 31 persons in the
group of the rank of assistant principal officer and upwards, 12 entered
as clerical officers, 12 as executive officers and 7 otherwise. 26 of these,
or 84 per cent, about twice the country average, were former pupils of
the Christian Brothers. To complete the educational picture, 49 out of
the 163 (12 out of the 31 assistant principal officers and upwards) had
university degrees or diplomas.
These figures, however valid they may be for other purposes, do reasonably establish that the civil service, through the education of its members,
has been considerably influenced by the Christian Brothers. Before commenting on this, I should like to adopt as my own a paragraph from the
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preface to H. E. Dale's work on the Higher Civil Service of Great
Britain: ' I am conscious that many of the suggestions and statements
I have made are matters of personal opinion on which others with experience and knowledge equal to or greater than my own may strongly dissent
from my views. If suggestions and statements appear sometimes to be
put forward rather dogmatically, it is not from a surplus of intellectual
certainty but merely to avoid the awkwardness of perpetually interpolating
phrases like ' I think *, * it appears to me ', ' s o far as I can judge ',
in a composition where luckily official caution is not a primary virtue " . 1
The Christian Brothers were founded to provide education for poor
Catholic boys. In their application to the Holy See for Papal approval
in 1808, they were described as *' a congregation of pious and devoted
laymen who devote themselves to imparting to poor boys such instruction
and charitable assistance as the [Presentation] nuns afford to poor girls " , 2
and in the Brief of Pope Pius V I I , which is the charter of the Christian
Schools, it is laid down that they should " make it their principal care
to teach boys, particularly the poor " . 3 In the early years of their
activities, it was only to be expected that because of their mission and,
of course, for sound historical reasons, the great majority of their pupils
should be the children of poor parents. The Penal Laws, though losing
their grip, still imposed disabilities of all kinds on Catholics and affluence
and the practice of the Catholic religion seldom went hand in hand.
From their very first days the Christian Brothers were constrained by
circumstances to provide an education which was above all practical and
different in a number of ways not only from that then available for the
sons of gentlemen but also from that given in the hedge schools. Their
pupils, the forerunners of an Irish democracy then struggling painfully
to its knees, had only their own native ability to rely on and if they were
to make any place in the world, they would have to pull themselves up
by their own shoestrings. In fact, the only asset they could have, in a
material sense, was the knowledge they might acquire at school. Moreover, it was not only necessary to provide these boys with an education
but also to prove, publicly if possible, that they had in fact acquired
that education. It is significant that for more than fifty years before the
passing of the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act, 1878, annual public
examinations, attended by the Bishops, the clergy, the city members, the
mayor and other leading men of the city, were held at the Cork Christian
Schools.
In 1884, five years after the intermediate education system
had come into operation, a larger number of boys passed the examination
1 H. E. Dale, The Higher Civil Service of Great Britain, 1941.
2 Rev. Brother J. D. Fitzpatrick, Edmund Bice, Founder and First Superior
General of the Brothers of the Christian School in Ireland, 1945, p. 166.
3 A Century of Catholic Education, by a Christian Brother, 1916, pp. 26-27.
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from Our Lady's Mount, Cork, than from any other school or college in
Ireland. In the next year, the Cork Christian Schools came second in
the number of prizes and honours won by the pupils and in 1887 the
schools attained first place in this regard, a position they held fifteen
times up to 1915. In fact, during the three years 1888 to 1891, 40
per cent of the passes, 22 per cent of exhibitions and 20 per cent of the
medals were awarded to pupils of the Christian Brothers schools in the
country. Commenting on that at the time, Lord Justice Fitzgibbon said:
at that time (1879), there was a strong feeling that the standard of
education should be lowered for a while, in order that the Roman Catholics might be able to obtain their due share of the results. It was made
the cause of complaint the first year or two that the pupils of the unendowed Christian Brothers were carrying off the greater proportion of
the prizes and that the standard should be raised to give the classical
schools a chance. The standard was raised but with results contrary
to the expectation of those who had clamoured for it and a still larger
proportion of the Christian Brothers' candidates were successful after the
standard was raised than before it " . 4
T w o developments which have taken place since the middle of the
nineteenth century, the growth of an Irish middle class and the political
changes of the 1920s, have affected the Christian Brothers' system of
secondary education without altering it fundamentally.
Boys from all
social classes now attend their schools and have done so for many years.
Many parents, though in a position to pay the higher fees required in other
schools, and in a position, too, to find a place for their children other
than through proven educational attainments, prefer the Christian Brothers'
way of teaching. Nevertheless, the Christian Brothers are still the main
source of secondary education for the children of those who cannot afford
high school fees or seek for their children the education best fitted for
them to make their way in life solely by their own efforts as early as
possible after leaving school. Public examinations were the outlet for
the boys of such parents and, geared as they were in examination techniques through their Christian Brothers' teaching, it is not surprising that
year by year they should capture the positions in the civil service.
Largely as a result of their concentration on examinations, which was
perhaps unavoidable, the Christian Brothers had little opportunity of
fostering the non-academic and extra-curricular activities of their pupils
and, though the development of character was always in the forefront
of their teaching, those who passed through their schools were liable to
acquire a slightly over-academic education and to lack in some degree
4 Christian Brothers' Educational Record, 1898, p. 147.
op. cit., p. 312.
Quoted by Fitzpatrick,
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a fully rounded personality. I am conscious, of course, that lack of
roundness can equally well be the result of a much more laisser faire
system of teaching. T h e stern discipline in the schools also—I speak
of about thirty years ago—did create an impression on youthful minds
that life during one's schooldays was real and very earnest. A point cf
view put forward by Dale is worth quoting here (even if only to allow
it to be disputed): he is speaking of a defect which he professes to see
in certain British higher civil servants due to their driving themselves too
much, or being over driven in boyhood and youth.
' It is not strange **,
he says, ** if after such prolonged exertion at such an age he has taken
out of himself for ever some of the reserve of vital energy, the abounding
animal spirits, which in the long run are more valuable than intellect for
success in practical life " . 5
What kind of people then would one expect to find in an organisation
staffed almost entirely by those who have received their education from
this same teaching order and who have been recruited, with very few
exceptions, through competitive examination at about the highest level
of secondary examination? Socially, they should have come from the
middle classes, not so much from the have nots and yet certainly not in
large numbers from the haves—from the kind of people, say, who, when
they die, leave their children a house and something in the way of life
insurance. They should be for the most part the sons of people in various
kinds of salaried positions, official and otherwise. If the sample statistics
have any applicability, not many of them would have come directly from
the rural areas. Of the 163 persons taken, only 2 4 , or 15 per cent,
were the sons of farming parents. T h e majority of them should have
been affected to a greater or lesser degree by the strongly nationalist
tendency, both linguistic and political, of the Christian Brothers' education.
It is unusual to find a past pupil of the Christian Brothers with what is
usually called a West British outlook. T h e sample statistics show that
128 out of a possible 153, that is 84 per cent, entered the civil service
as either clerical officers, executive officers or officers of customs and
excise. T h e civil service seems to be a remarkably homogeneous organisation in many ways, in the origin of its members, in their educational
background, in the level of their education on starting work, in the channel
through which they found a job, in the influences which moulded them
during their formative years, in the environment in which they grew up.
But for the cussedness of the Irish character in refusing to conform to
type, one would imagine this to be an easily recognisable group.
Because of the highly competitive nature of the civil service examinations and of the attraction (up to recent years) of the civil service as a
5 op. cit., p. 75.
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job, it is not unfair to say that the boys who were successful in gaining
the annual vacancies have been among those who achieved the best results
academically at school. It is this, I would say, which causes the civil
service to differ from other large organisations also staffed through open
competitive examination.
Have boys most successful academically at
school any common characteristics? At one extreme, they should be
the most brilliant boys in their class: at the other, a few who are just
lucky as examinees. In between should come those of fair ability and
with some power of concentrated application, those with a better
than average memory but not otherwise gifted out of the ordinary, the
plodder with a capacity for taking pains, and the bookworms. It should
be expected that they would have in common some modicum of ability,
a capacity or aptitude for study, a love of knowledge and the will to
acquire it, a habit of thoroughness and a serious turn of mind. Almost
never, one might say, would they be the extrovert sort. They would
have, and here I take a deeper plunge, an incipient belief that knowledge
is not only power but is the only power, a slight tendency towards intellectual arrogance and no marked readiness to suffer fools gladly. If they
have found their way into the civil service via the Christian Brothers,
they would be likely to excel in mathematics if only because that subject
carries such high marks in the intermediate and civil service examinations
and because it is a subject on which the Christian Brothers concentrated
and which they taught magnificently.
From the moment a person enters the civil service he, of course, comes
under the moulding influence of the organisation itself and, as the years go
on, many other influences naturally exert their effect on him. It would
be foolish, then, to assert dogmatically that some characteristic of the
civil service as it is can be ascribed wholely to some particular cause. It
is sometimes said of it, for instance, that it is too prone to believe that
any problem can be solved on paper and too swayed by cold reason. If
there is any truth in this, is it because the administrative machine engenders that attitude of mind or because of the pragmatical educational
upbringing of so many of the individuals who compose it? One might
attempt to assess the influence of the Christian Brothers by inquiring
whether the civil service would be any different if it had been staffed
through the schools run by other religious congregations. It could well
be that a good deal more public business would be carried on through
personal contacts: there is little solidarity, in the old school tie sense,
between ex-pupils of the Christian Brothers. T h e civil service would
perhaps take on more the character of a business concern with its public
relations side more strongly developed than at present. What the results
of this would be in other directions, I would hesitate to say. More trial
and error, perhaps, less caution, more mistakes. For all the dislike of
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change attributed to it by the public, the civil service is seldom satisfied
with the economic or social position as it is and feels no ancestral urge
to maintain it unchanged. It constantly seeks to fulfill its own mildly
revolutionary dreams of perfection. Staffed otherwise, it could easily,
while becoming more adventurous in its conduct of business, turn more
fixed and conservative in its outlook.
Having sailed those uncharted seas so far, I still see no landfall.
Though no civil servant worthy of his salt would conclude a memorandum
without a recommendation, I yet would not dare to arrive at any conclusion here except this.
If the management of public affairs in this
country has any distinctive Irish features, this must be ascribed in great
measure to the fact that the Christian Brothers have played such an
important part in the creation of the modern Irish civil service. I realise
that many will disagree with the views expressed in this article and out
here in the open, far from cover, I do feel like a sitting target. Perhaps
I should have followed the example of a certain eighteenth century
gentleman:
Though pleas'd to see the dolphins play,
I mind my compass and my way.
One final point before returning to what the editor of A D M I N I S T R A T I O N described in the first issue as the impregnable safety of
silence. Anyone expressing an opinion on this subject is bound to be
affected by his own personal experiences. As it happens, I have mostly
pleasant memories of schooldays with the Christian Brothers and I remember with affection many teachers who made the pursuit of knowledge
an enjoyable and fascinating one. Any criticisms I have made then are
quite impersonal and in no sense at all have I been attempting to get rid
of a Freudian complex or to exorcise the ghosts of an unhappy childhood.
It would be most ungenerous to withhold a tribute to the Christian
Brothers for the immense work they have done since their foundation in
the difficult years of the early nineteenth century and that tribute I gladly
pay here.
S.
O MATHUNA