Toxic privilege has no place in sport

THE words just jump off the page – “your father works for my father”, “we pay fees” – they’re shocking, although not necessarily surprising. They express the sentiment a lot of us, rightly or wrongly, suspect is rife in fee-paying schools.

They were relayed on the pages of The Irish Times last week by former international referee Owen Doyle from what he heard during the Leinster Senior Cup matches. The Leinster Senior Cup being the premier schools rugby competition in the country and the playground of the Blackrock and Belvedere Colleges of this world.

The atmosphere at these games seems to be turning increasingly poisonous. An Garda Síochána have even had to warn schools that they are “at the point now where action must be taken when incidents occur”.

Now it would seem that the worst of this behaviour emanates not from current students of these institutions, but from relatively recent past students, which makes it all the more difficult for the schools in question to do anything about it.

That, however, doesn’t mean that those schools don’t carry some sort of responsibility for the behaviour and the attitudes that engender it. This after all is the attitude of people who have gone through six years of education in these schools. The sentiments expressed – which include what Doyle describes as being “on the cusp of racial abuse” – reflect a toxic privilege and lead one to consider the place fee paying schools play in our society, to consider whether they are a force for good or ill.

It needs to be stressed, of course, that this is a minority of former students behaving in such a manner, the vast majority of former students of fee-paying schools behave impeccably, but even so in a republic should we really be facilitating schools which foster this kind of privilege?

And we do facilitate it. All of us do, even those of us who have never spent a day in a fee-paying school or who never would send our children to them out of principle. It was reported last year that private schools in Ireland get €90m a year in state funding. That strikes us as kind of obscene. Sure you can argue that everybody has a right to an education in this country and that level of funding reflects that, but even if the state did withdraw that funding would these students still not be able to attend a public school?

We can’t ban fee-paying schools, but we can at least stop funding them out of public coffers.