Historically, patriarchy has been as dominant in education in Ireland as elsewhere. In the Irish context, it was promoted through the male-dominated Catholic Church, which controlled either directly or indirectly the vast majority of education institutions in the country. This dominant hegemony was most powerful during the period…

This essay argues for the development of a research agenda on the comparative history of Catholic education internationally from the nineteenth century to the present. This requires, in the first instance, the production of a series of individual-country case studies, concentrating on relations between the Catholic Church and the particular state…

Education for Irish women and girls developed significantly in the period 1830-1910. During this time, formal state-funded education systems were established in Ireland by the British government. Some of these systems included females from their inception and some attempted to exclude girls and women. This article charts the opening up of formal…

The establishment of the National University of Ireland (NUI) in 1908 brought an end to a protracted dispute over the "Irish university question" which had dominated the Irish political agenda at least since the 1850s. The central issue throughout this entire period was the provision of acceptable university education for lay Catholics,…

This article examines the network of women's colleges which emerged in Ireland in the latter half of the nineteenth century in response to women's exclusion from the realm of the university and their desire to participate in higher education. These colleges, run largely along denominational lines, were situated in the major cities with the…

The movement for the higher education of women in Ireland in the nineteenth century has traditionally been viewed as a Protestant initiative. Scholarship suggests that the Irish campaign developed along the same lines as the English movement, gaining from and growing out of the English advances. Leading Protestant schools for girls have been…