State Aid to Agriculture in Ireland. 41 



Ireland the general trend of industry is rural rather than 

 urban, since the agricultural interest itself naturally dominates 

 the others. Most of the provincial towns are as much rural 

 as urban in their economic circvimstances : hence the problem 

 of technical instruction in such a country must naturally be 

 how to provide a population mainly rural with a training 

 that w'ill not only help them to develop agriculture, but give 

 them aptitudes for industries not yet existent among them, 

 which their trained intelligence must be the chief agent in 

 creating. Thus it comes that from the science and art 

 institutions in Dublin down to the secondary schools in small 

 provincial towns, the agricultural and industrial features of 

 technical instruction are continuously interwoven, and must 

 be considered with a common thought for both. It was the 

 conviction of those who projected the Department that the 

 main activities of the country must ever be agriculture and 

 its subsidiary industries. Above all it was their desire that 

 education, technical and secondary, should as far as possible 

 be deliberately related to the real economic and social needs 

 of the country. 



Upon the basis of these ideas the new Department was 

 founded. The Department consists of the President (who is 

 the Chief Secretary for the time being) and the Vice-President, 

 who is its working head and a Minister in Parliament. The 

 staff consists of a Secretary, two Assistant Secretaries (one for 

 Agriculture and one for Technical Instruction), as well as 

 certain heads of Branches, together with a number of 

 " Inspectors, Instructors, Officers, and Servants." There is a 

 Council of Agriculture, and two Boards, one for Agriculture 

 and the other for Technical Instruction. The Council consists 

 of 104 members ; 68 of these are elected by the County 

 Council and 34 are nominated by the Department. The 

 President and Vice-President are ex-officio members of the 

 Council and of both Boards. The Council itself creates the 

 larger part of the Agricultural Board, and shares with the 

 County Boroughs the appointment of the majority of the Board 

 of Technical Instruction ; to these Boards is entrusted the 

 control of the funds with which the Department is endowed. 

 It will thus be seen that the Council has a good deal of direct 

 power, while its influence as an advisory body is so great that 

 the Vice-President could hardly ignore its opinion, representing 

 as it so largelj- does the agricultural and industrial interests of 

 Ireland. These representative Ixxlies (the Council and the two 

 Boards) are a new feature in the administrative system of the 

 United Kingdom, and were adapted from Continental models. 

 The (Jouncil of Agricidture differs from its foreign prototypes 

 in the greater amount of direct power entrusted to it. The 



