Dublin Opinion

It’s early September, the beginning of the school year and the resulting increase in the number of cars filled with parents and their children plumps out the summer’s steady stream of traffic into fat ribbons of congestion. With this of course, we also have the news that once again there are not enough school places in the areas where the population has increased due to immigration.

This year the big school ‘scandal’ concerns the emergency provision of a school in Diswellstown for 50 of the 90 pupils who were unable to get a place in the two Catholic schools in the area because of lack of availability but also because they weren’t catholic.

Of course, a school has been provided at relatively short notice and the irony is that the patron of the school is the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin. This is not unusual in Ireland (although atypical in the rest of the EU). All new Irish primary schools must have a patron and generally that patron is the Catholic or Church of Ireland bishop in the region the school is being set up.

The request for the school was made to the Catholic Church by the Department of Education last May when it was realized that the numbers seeking a place could not be provided for in the two catholic schools in the area. The pressure for places was exacerbated by the fact that the closing date for enrolment finished before many of those who needed a school place in September had arrived in the country.

However, the fact remains that both of the existing schools in the Diswellstown area maintained a policy of giving priority to pupils who had had a Catholic baptism, thereby excluding many recent immigrants who belonged to a different religion.

They could do this of course, because the state has not done enough to date to secularize the enrolment of students in the school system (although it has recently provided some support to school organizations which are not controlled by either of the main denominations in Ireland).
It has not done so because despite the fact that the cost of running schools is paid for by the state, almost all the primary schools in the country are privately owned.

The issue highlights a situation that Ireland is not very good at dealing with at the moment. We like to think that we are a new modern Ireland, one which is no longer controlled by the institutions of the Catholic Church, as had been the case for so long.

Advocates of the ‘New Ireland’ talk about the waning influence of the Church and how the institutions of the state, such as the Gardai, are secular, bound only by the values enshrined by the legislator. We are all Europeans now: modern, secularized, where the divisions between church and state are so wide that you could build four sets of chic apartment blocks between the walls of each.

When it comes to education though, and particularly primary education, we can see how that division is an illusion.

The way that the Irish school system is set up means that although the state covers the costs of running a school that school cannot be set up in the first place unless there are ‘local contributions’.

As Professor Áine Hyland, Professor of Education at University College, Cork put it in an 1997 article published on the Educate Together website:

“In the Republic of Ireland, management and ownership of schools is effectively available only to those in a position to provide a high proportion of the initial capital costs and to sustain an on-going proportion of current costs. On the one hand, the Government makes the payment of grants to primary schools in Ireland conditional on the availability of a local contribution; on the other hand, it forbids school authorities from levying a charge or collecting fees.”

So Scoil Choilm, in Diswellstown required the patronage of the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin to be set up in the first place. However, the normal restriction of religion had to be dropped for pragmatic reasons. As Ms Lowe, the principal of the school told the Irish Times ‘although Scoil Choilm would have a Catholic ethos it would provide an inclusive form of education. That is, the students will be allowed to opt out of classes that would involve religious instruction.

Again, according to the Irish Times:

“Issues of religion had been aired with parents last month, she said, and they were “very happy with the arrangements”, which include an opt-out from certain religious classes and prayers.”

However, as Professor Hyland shows, the ability to opt out was available more easily before 1965 than it was after. Up until 1965:

“schools were required to timetable Religious Education during the school day in such a way that children whose parents did not want them to attend religious instruction classes could still attend the secular classes in the school. Moreover, the regulations required teachers to be sensitive to children of different religions in any matters which might be discussed or taught.”

However, in 1965 and in 1971 the Department of Education made changes which would formally determine the denominational character of Irish primary schools. Those changes involved creating a new curriculum which encouraged the integration of all subjects at primary level, both secular and religious.

The teachers handbook at the time stated:

“The decision to construct an integrated curriculum is based on the following theses: …that the separation of religious and secular instruction into differentiated subject compartments serves only to throw the whole educational function out of focus. The integration of the curriculum may be seen…in the religious and civic spirit which animates all its parts.”

This meant that each secular elements of the curriculum as it was taught during the school day was inseparable from the religious element. As Hyland points out:

“While the rule under which parents were allowed to opt their children out of religious instruction still remained, this rule became effectively inoperable since religious and secular instruction would now be integrated. Even if religious instruction were separately timetabled, it could be assumed that a specifically denominational ethos would “permeate the school day”.”

This controlling influence of the ethos of the school was further enshrined in the Education Act 1998, which was the first time that the education system was brought under legislative control. The act obliged the schools Board of Management to uphold the ethos of its Patron and a controlling influence to the patrons of National Schools.

Section 15 – 2 (b) of the Act states the Board of Management must:

“ uphold, and be accountable to the patron for so upholding, the characteristic spirit of the school as determined by the cultural, educational, moral, religious, social, linguistic and spiritual values and traditions which inform and are characteristic of the objectives and conduct of the school, and at all times act in accordance with any Act of the Oireachtas or instrument made thereunder, deed, charter, articles of management or other such instrument relating to the establishment or operation of the school”

There is an alternative, however, and the other school related news today highlights it as well.

Over the last few years the non-denominational Educate Together schools project has been lobbying successive Ministers of Education and Finance to support their expansion in areas where it is clear there is a shortage of schools and where the population increases have been mainly from the non-catholic immigrant community. Again, at the urgent request of the Minister of Education Mary Hannifin, two new Educate Together schools have opened in Adamstown and Laytown respectively.

This is good news. But it must be remembered how difficult it has been to begin to get to a situation where the Government is able to support such projects. Professor Hyland article details much of the tribulations that were involved in taking the relatively straight forward step of setting the first non-denominational school in Ireland, the Dalkey School Project. That school is now seriously over subscribed as many parents in the area have a deep desire to send their children to a school which doesn’t demand the adherence to a particular religious ethos as a prerequisite of entry to their school.

Why should it be that the majority of parents do NOT have a choice about whether or not their children are taught religion in schools?

Article 42.2 of the Irish Constitution states:

“The State shall provide for free primary education and shall endeavour to supplement and give reasonable aid to private and corporate educational initiative, and when the public good requires it provide other educational facilities or institutions with due regard however for the rights of parents especially in the matter of religious or moral formation.”

Jerry Whyte, in an article in 1992 speaks about the Catholic tenor of these provisions:

“These provisions (of the 1937 Constitution) reflected Roman Catholic social teaching by enshrining a principle of parental supremacy in respect of the education of children.”

However, what happens when the parents aren’t Catholic?

The solution of course, is to challenge the Church’s restriction on Catholic only entry and to change the Education Act 1998 in this regard. Last February, Mary Hannifin had arranged for the VEC to act as patrons in Diswellstown, saying at the time that new VEC sponsored school would provide “for the religious, moral and ethical education of children in conformity with the wishes of their parents”.

Very much in the spirit of the constitution, is it not?

While that project can’t be put in place until 2008 (why I don’t know) surely it’s not too much of a stretch to apply that laudable principle more universally.

Links: The Educate Together site also has a handy primer on the history of the Irish Primary Education System.