Minority faiths are road kill in the rush to crush Catholic schools
IF LEFT-WING TD Ruth Coppinger was to have her way, denominational education in Ireland would be wiped out. It would be replaced with a uniform, one-size-fits-all, State-run system. Ironically, this would be done in the name of ‘diversity’.
Ms Coppinger’s ‘Equal Participation in Schools Bill’, which came before the Dáil this week, would render denominational schooling null and void. Denominational schools, in the event of over-enrolment, would be forbidden from admitting pupils from the same faith community as the school first.
They would no longer be allowed to have a religious ethos. Religious instruction and faith formation would have to take place outside school hours. Implement all this, and we no longer have denominational schools in Ireland irrespective of what parents might actually want.
Whoever turns out to be Enda Kenny’s successor – be it Leo or Simon – he will have to decide what place he wants denominational schools to have in Irish life. During Mr Kenny’s term of office, the signals were almost wholly negative from the point of view of the denominational sector. Mr Kenny appears to have been content to let successive education minsters target the sector to their hearts’ content. What will Leo or Simon do?
The left knows, the hard left at any rate, what it wants to do. It wants an end to the sector entirely. The left likes to elevate a certain idea of equality, in this case uniformity, ahead of other values such as the rights of parents.
Fortunately, our Constitution gives pride of place to parents with regard to the education of their children, as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Article 42 of Bunreacht na hÉireann says: “The State acknowledges that the primary and natural educator of the child is the family.”
The Universal Declaration insists that parents “have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children”.
The left’s vision of education puts the State, not parents, at the centre of things. The left believes the State knows best.
Not alone is this not a Christian vision of how best to do things, it has nothing whatsoever to do with true liberalism either. True liberalism is about the freedom to make choices that do no demonstrable harm to others.
Secular campaigners want to wipe out freedom of choice with regard to education and schooling. In this vision, not only must denominational education be destroyed, any form of schooling that the State does not approve of must also be destroyed.
The Government has rejected the Coppinger bill. Nonetheless, it is also putting the denominational sector under great pressure on multiple fronts, including on admissions policy. Like his two immediate predecessors, Education Minister Richard Bruton is targeting this issue.
He seems to have been listening to campaigners and commentators complaining about the so-called ‘baptism barrier’, a loaded term if ever there was one, but a term most of the media seem happy to use.
The fact is, all schools have selection criteria. These criteria, among other things, determine what happens if a school is overenrolled. You might be from outside the catchment area, in which case you are being excluded from the school because of a ‘geography barrier’.
Or you might be excluded because you don’t have a brother or sister in the school, in which case you’ve fallen victim to a ‘family barrier’.
Or else you might be excluded because the school operates a first come, first served policy – in which case if you’ve come to live in the area too late, then too bad. You’ve fallen victim to a ‘new arrivals barrier’.
What denominational schools say is that when they are over-enrolled (which very rarely happens) they will admit children from their own faith community first because that is why they were established.
If this right is taken away it will hit minority faith schools hardest. The great majority of people in Ireland remain at least nominally Catholic so the big majority of pupils in most Catholic schools will still be Catholic in name at least.
But when you are in a small minority and you are forced to operate something like a first come, first served policy, a Church of Ireland school would quickly find that Church of Ireland children would be swamped by the majority community.
Many would not be able to get into their own schools.
Think about this. It would mean Church of Ireland children would not be able to get into a Church of Ireland school founded primarily to serve and foster and preserve the Church of Ireland community in Ireland.
It is for this reason that the Church of Ireland released a strong statement on the matter last month and it is why Mr Bruton is having to think long and hard about the admissions policy issue because if he goes about it in the wrong way, he will end up badly damaging Church of Ireland schools and therefore the Church of Ireland community also.
The same obviously applies to the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Muslims and the Jews.
Writing in ‘The Irish Catholic’ recently, Church of Ireland member and former government minister Dr Martin Mansergh questioned whether Irish liberals ever really cared that much for the rights of minority faiths.
He said that back in the 1980s it suited liberals to preach about pluralism and about the place of minority faith sin a Catholic-dominated society, but that today they have “discarded” pluralism in favour of an out-and-out secular agenda that targets the rights of all faiths.
The danger is that in the current secular rush to attack all things Catholic, the various minority faiths will become so much road kill. Will Leo Varadkar or Simon Coveney ensure this does not happen, or will they join the rush to crush?
Will Enda’s successor have a basically hostile attitude towards Church-run schools?