DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, Etc., FOR IRELAND. 287 



spirit of economic and social self-help among-st the people generally. The Act 

 contemplates that the six County Boroughs should formulate their own 

 schemes ; and the Department desires, in the area outside the County 

 Boroughs as well, to stimulate local initiative in the preparation of schemes of 

 Agriculture and Technical Instruction. It delegates to them, moreover, the local 

 administration of such schemes, and has assisted them to construct a 

 machinery for this administration in the shape of County Committees for Live 

 Stock, and for Agricultural and Technical Instruction, and Urban Committees 

 for Technical Instruction. This course has an educational value of importance, 

 inasmuch as, on the one hand, it gives the Department the benefit of local 

 opinions and experience, and, on the other, it brings the local bodies themselves 

 into contact with the difficulties of the problems to be dealt with. It helps, 

 besides, to produce in the country a sympathetic understanding of the neces- 

 sarily tedious process by which sound reforms of this kind are accomplished. 



With a view to rendering its advice more effective and better informed, the 

 Department consider it wise to establish, through their officers, direct and 

 pergonal relations with the local authorities, societies, schools, and those 

 classes of the people generally with whom their work has to do. It is felt that 

 correspondence alone would be an inadequate means of explaining a new and 

 complicated Act, and of working out highly technical schemes with bodies who 

 are under no obligation to adopt them. The Department have, consequently, 

 in the person of their representatives, been ready to visit every local authority, 

 confer with them on the spot, and aid them with expert advice after thorough 

 inspection and examination of local conditions. Practically all the County 

 Councils and Urban Councils or Technical Instruction Committees in Ireland 

 have thus been visited by the Department — some of these bodies many times — 

 and very numerous personal conferences have taken place at the ofifices in 

 Upper Merrion-street between the Department's officers and representatives of 

 local committees. The great majority of the schools and educational institu- 

 tions in Ireland above the primary grade have likewise been visited by their 

 Inspectors. It is gratifying to have to report that the relations thus established 

 have proved of the most satisfactory kind. While they create a human link 

 between the Department and the local bodies, they keep the Department itself, 

 as no other method could, in intimate touch with the actual conditions of the 

 country. In no other way would it have been possible to make such progress 

 with the local authorities as has been made. Some idea of the nature of this 

 progress may be gathered from the fact that every local authority in Ireland 

 resolved to raise a rate for the purposes of the Act within the first financial 

 year ; and that the only large general schemes which the Department issued to 

 the local authorities from itself — those for Encouraging Improvement in the 

 breeds of Horses, and of Cattle, Sheep, and Swine — were adopted by all the 

 County Councils in Ireland, save two. It will take considerable time and a 

 certain amount of inevitable friction before a system of complex and very 

 technical administration is got to work, but it is felt that, in the manner 

 described, a mutual confidence will steadily be engendered between the 

 Department and those with whom it has, locally, to deal. 



4. DiRETT Means of Action. 



It is thus fundamental in the constitution of the Department that the 

 interest and responsibility of the people themselves, through the central 

 Boards and through the local Councils and Committees, should be engaged in 

 its work. The chief means by which it is hoped that work may in time be 

 accomplished will be found indicated in more detail in the account which 

 follows, of what has actually been done during the period covered by this 



