I have now said enough about the aims and objects, the constitution and powers, and the relations with other Governmental institutions, of the new Department, to enable the reader to form a fairly accurate estimate of its general character, scope and purpose.  From what it is I shall pass in the next chapter to what it does, and there I must describe its everyday work in some detail.  But I wish I could also give the reader an adequate picture of the surge of activities raised by the first plunge of the Department into Irish life and thought.  After a time the torrent of business made channels for itself and went on in a more orderly fashion; practical ideas and promising openings were sifted out at an early stage of their approach to the Department from those which were neither one nor the other; time was economised, work distributed, and the functions of demand and supply in relation to the Department’s work throughout Ireland were brought into proper adjustment with each other.  Yet, even at first, to a sympathetic and understanding view, the waste of time and thought involved in dealing with impossible projects and dispelling false hopes was compensated for by the evidence forced upon us that the Irish people had no notion of regarding the Department as an alien institution with which they need concern themselves but little, however much it might concern itself with them.  They were never for a moment in doubt as to its real meaning and purpose.  They meant to make it their own and to utilise it in the uplifting of their country.  No description of the machinery of the institution could explain the real place which it took in the life of the country from the very beginning.  But perhaps it may give the reader a more living interest in this part of the story, and a more living picture of the situation, if I try to convey to his mind some of the impressions left on my own, by my experiences during the period immediately following the projection of this new phenomenon into Irish consciousness.

When in Upper Merrion-street, Dublin, opposite to the Land Commission, big brass plates appeared upon the doors of a row of houses announcing that there was domiciled the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, the average man in the street might have been expected to murmur, ‘Another Castle Board,’ and pass on.  It was not long, however, before our visiting list became somewhat embarrassing.  We have since got down, as I have said, to a more humdrum, though no less interesting, official life inside the Department.  But let the reader imagine himself to have been concealed behind a screen in my office on a day when some event, like the Dublin Horse Show, brought crowds in from the country to the Irish capital.  Such an experience would certainly have given him a new understanding of some then neglected men and things.  While I was opening the morning’s letters and dealing with “Files” marked “urgent,” he would see nothing to distinguish