speaking population that they really and truly possess in their language a great asset of the highest national importance, and that nothing short of this will bring home to the mind of the Gaelic Irishman that after three or four hundred years of oppression he is at last ceasing to be the under dog in Ireland, and I firmly believe that until he loses the sense of inferiority that has been so long and so sedulously impressed upon him the Irish nation can neither thrive nor prosper.
That the country at large is of this way of thinking is shown by the fact that nineteen County Councils, including the whole of Munster and Connacht, two of the provinces that will most largely feed the University, have passed resolutions calling on the Senate to make Irish an essential. . . . Several of these County Councils have gone further and pledged themselves to raise no rates for the University (they have the statutory power to raise a penny in the pound) unless this be done. About one hundred and thirty District and Urban Councils and Boards of Guardians out of about one hundred and seventy have adopted the same resolution. The General Council of County Councils (the nearest approach to an all-Ireland representative body) have adopted it also with only one dissentient. The great national convention held last February, at which two thousand delegates were present from County Councils, Borough Councils, District Councils and branches of the United Irish League from all over Ireland, passed the Gaelic League resolution by a majority of three to one, although Mr. John Dillon, M.P., in a most powerful speech tried to dissuade them from doing so. On no other subject except that of Home Rule has the country been so unanimous. If the Senate consider themselves as in a fiduciary rather than a didactic position, and consequently bound to administer Irish education in the way demanded by the Irish people, then the result has been already decided.
But the Senate may not take this view.
