At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Irish national school system catered for the educational needs of almost 800,000 children in 8,500 schools. Despite its manifest numerical success and its agency in the near elimination of illiteracy, issues such as clerical management, the payment by results system, inferior school conditions, the proliferation of small schools, the restricted curriculum, the teaching of Irish and the reorganisation of the inspectorate generated a confluence of challenging circumstances for all participants. This was the scenario presented to Dr William Starkie, academic and classical scholar, who was appointed Resident Commissioner of Education in 1899. This study charts the fortunes of the national school system from 1899 to 1922, a period roughly coinciding with the tenure of Dr W.J.M. Starkie as Resident Commissioner of National Education. This commenced with an active programme of curricular and administrative reform that served to modernise primary education in Ireland, which had lagged behind systems elsewhere. Parallel with this programme of change, there were strong intimations that the British government harboured plans to reform Irish education and its administration along the de facto lines recently pursued in England. As the primary education system in Ireland had evolved into a denominational one, financed by government but clerically managed, the various Churches were in the main generally satisfied. As a result, every suggestion that schools be financed by rates and under local control was stoutly resisted. Successive chief secretaries failed to progress this policy. Furthermore, Starkie’s energetic approach to administrative reform not only encountered opposition, it generated additional problems. The new system of pay, increments and promotion for teachers, introduced in tandem with the Revised Curriculum, and combined with a changed inspectoral remit proved problematic, with the result that although curricular reform was successfully introduced, progress was disrupted by financial and organisational issues. Two vice-regal inquiries, in 1913 and 1918, delved minutely into primary education provision under the National Board. These highlighted the scale of the deficiencies of the existing system and provided the impetus, had it been fully grasped, for further organisational and administrative change. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 ensured the matter was put on the back burner for the duration, and when it was taken up again, in its immediate aftermath, it was too late. A final attempt was made in 1918 20 to address the structural deficiencies of the Irish educational system. Had this been achieved, it would have resulted in the replacement of the National Board, which was no longer fit for purpose, by a state Department of Education in the manner of that already in place in Great Britain. This was not possible in Ireland because of political and ideological developments that heralded the breakup of the Union. The rise of cultural nationalism, and with it the Gaelic League, had brought increasingly exigent calls for the introduction of a bilingual programme of education. These were addressed at first by curricular accommodation, but the 1916 Rising raised nationalist aspirations. When it came to education provision, nationalists and the Catholic Church increasingly found common cause in the late 1910s and, as a new political disposition beckoned, the alliance forged was a hallmark f or the future in which the churches and the Catholic Church in particular were permitted to retain their ascendant position in the provision of education and the state acceded to an essentially subordinate, administrative position.