After the partition of Ireland, the newly established parliament in Belfast was given control over education. The unionist government, mainly representing the majoritarian Protestant population, embarked on a reform of the pre-existing denominational education system and tried to persuade all the churches to transfer their schools to state control…

In 1998, Byrne and McKeown examined the churches' roles in Northern Ireland's (NI) schooling system. NI was then governed by direct-rule from the UK's Westminster Parliament. The authors concluded that the desire of the Protestant churches to re-establish their influence in schools was "unlikely to succeed." This was contrasted with the…

Historians have observed that the period 1860-1890 was educationally progressive. This paper identifies the renaissance with the creation of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland in the aftermath of Church Disestablishment. Disestablishment legislation facilitated the inclusion of the laity in Synod. The paper argues that the lay-clerical…