Starkie, William Joseph Myles (1860–1920), classical scholar, last resident commissioner of education under British rule in Ireland, and privy councillor, was born 10 December 1860 at Elsinore Lodge, Rosses Point, Co. Sligo, the fifth son (baptised a catholic, in contrast to his older brothers) and elder sibling of two daughters of William Robert Starkie, JP, resident magistrate (in Sligo from 1859 to 1863), and his wife, Frances Maria, daughter of Frank Power of Waterford. The Starkie family lived in Tipperary and Galway before settling at Cregane Manor in Rosscarbery, Co. Cork, in the wake of the death of W. R. Starkie's father. Young William was educated briefly at Clongowes Wood College in 1876 before being sent the following year to Shrewsbury School in England. Since he was a catholic, he was boarded out, but this did not prevent him from being appointed head boy in 1879, the first catholic to occupy the post since the Reformation. He was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in Michaelmas term 1880, and obtained his BA in the classical tripos in 1884 with first-class honours.
From 1883 to 1886 Starkie was professor of classics in the Catholic University of Ireland, and in 1888 was awarded first senior moderatorship in classics, senior moderatorship in ethics and logics at TCD, and the Madden prize, which provided him with the opportunity to travel to Persia and Palestine. He was elected fellow at TCD in 1890 and took his MA degree the following year. In 1896 he became a member of the academic council and in 1899 TCD conferred on him an honorary D.Litt. While lecturing in Latin at Alexandra College in the early 1890s, he met his future wife, then his pupil, May Caroline, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Cornelius Walsh, a solicitor. They married in 1893 and subsequently had six children: Walter Fitzwilliam, Enid Mary, Muriel, Ida, Nancy, and Humphrey Robert, who died in infancy.
In 1897 Starkie was appointed president of QCG and to the professorship of history, English literature, and mental science, but he resigned in 1899 to become resident commissioner of national education. The family returned to Dublin to take up residence in Fitzwilliam Place, and later occupied splendid properties in Killiney (one by Sir Thomas Deane (qv), and one by Benjamin Woodward (qv)), and Blackrock (a Georgian residence since demolished) before returning to suburban Ballsbridge. Following Starkie's appointment as resident commissioner his salary almost doubled, and the family came to adopt a high standard of living, maintaining a cook, servants, gardeners, governesses for the children, and, over a period, a butler. Mrs Starkie hosted musical soirées involving herself and her children, all of whom made their mark at the RIAM. In writing their autobiographies, Walter Starkie (qv), first professor of Spanish at TCD as well as first representative of the British Council in Spain, and Enid Starkie (qv), reader in French at Somerville College, Oxford, recalled their father's taste for the sybaritic, displayed both at home and in meals and holidays abroad shared with the Dublin stockbroker Laurence A. Waldron (qv), a taste which was to lead him to live beyond his means and leave his widow dependent on her children. In his academic career he focused particularly on Aristophanes, and edited the latter's Wasps (1897), Archanians (1909), and Clouds (1911).
Starkie's years as resident commissioner were plagued by controversy, which may be accounted for by taking into consideration the untempered zeal with which he took on the post in the wake of the Belmore commission's recommendations for reform, the degree of arrogance he displayed in believing himself to possess the panacea for all ills, and his autocratic methods. At the turn of the century he had already managed to antagonise not only the catholic school managers but members of the church hierarchy, especially Archbishop William J. Walsh (qv). Thus he acquired a reputation for being anti-clerical and, given the Unionist company he kept – such as, in the first decade of the century, the brilliant Anglo-Irish scholar and Trinity colleague John Pentland Mahaffy (qv) – was branded as anti-Irish, in spite of the efforts he had made to have the Irish language brought onto the school syllabus and his fidelity to catholicism, increasingly perceived, in the throes of a growing de-anglicising consciousness, as being one and the same with Irish identity. From 1903 he adopted a hands-on method in seeking to acquire reliable information about Irish schools by visiting a large number of them around the country, coming to resurrect an Arnoldian idea of ‘tone’, which he related to the character of the teacher and the resulting atmosphere created in the school. Indeed, he would come to claim that ‘the crown of all education is the priceless contact with an inspiring personality’ (O'Doherty (1997), 261). Sympathetic to the reading and performance of Shakespeare in schools, he also fought for better standards of hygiene and the wider provision of facilities as well as modernisation in the syllabus, such as the introduction of science. His wife's authorship in 1916 of a pamphlet entitled What is patriotism – unaccompanied by a question mark – which states rather than explores the concept, was widely interpreted as propaganda in favour of conscription and did not further the resident commissioner's popularity after the executions of May 1916.
The final years of Starkie's life carried disappointments. Plagued by debts and estranged from friends to whom he had been close, he hoped he might be appointed provost at Trinity, which would have reinforced his academic standing and provided for the higher education of his offspring. His hopes were dashed, and he died 21 July 1920 at Cushendun, Co. Antrim, a disappointed, sick man (struck down by diabetes), and in fear of his life following an attack on Tyrone House in Marlborough Street, seat of the Board of Education, by members of Sinn Féin. His papers are held at TCD.