Church told to hand over control of 23 more primary schools

Kiwi in IE

Actually I take that back. That was not a well thought out comment. The last thing I want is the uber Catholic 60+ generation voting as to how my children will be educated!

Cork Boy

A step in the right direction if nothing else

lazygal

I'm not holding my breath on a handover. I think the church and bishops have trusts formed all over and will only handover the dregs they can't be bothered with. I also think there'll be demands for compensation for the buildings.

Cork Boy

lazygal wrote: »

I'm not holding my breath on a handover. I think the church and bishops have trusts formed all over and will only handover the dregs they can't be bothered with. I also think there'll be demands for compensation for the buildings.

Then let them compensate the people who gave them the money for the buildings in the first place

lazygal

Cork Boy wrote: »

Then let them compensate the people who gave them the money for the buildings in the first place

The catholic church is known for its devious, underhanded, mercenary ways. Its asked for money in one handover in Dublin already, citing issues concerning the trust which had responsibility for the school.

MrPudding

lazygal wrote: »

I'm not holding my breath on a handover. I think the church and bishops have trusts formed all over and will only handover the dregs they can't be bothered with. I also think there'll be demands for compensation for the buildings.

Perhaps the government will actually challenge the sham trusts.

MrP

lazygal

MrPudding wrote: »

Perhaps the government will actually challenge the sham trusts.

MrP

There's no move to do so. I know a parent in the area where there was an issue with the trust and ET changeover and nothing's been resolved.

PopePalpatine

If the government are able to chase criminals' laundered funds and the stuff that they've bought with those laundered funds through CAB, surely they can do the same with all of these bullshit trusts.

Cork Boy

PopePalpatine wrote: »

If the government are able to chase criminals' laundered funds and the stuff that they've bought with those laundered funds through CAB, surely they can do the same with all of these bullshit trusts.

You've made the fundamental error in assuming there's a will on the part of the govt to do this.

Ruairi Quinn and a few others aside this government is still half loyal to Rome.

Don't forget the brandishing of the rosary beads at a cabinet meeting*.

*I'm aware this was denied but I don't believe the denial.

robp

PopePalpatine wrote: »

If the government are able to chase criminals' laundered funds and the stuff that they've bought with those laundered funds through CAB, surely they can do the same with all of these bullshit trusts.

Your basically suggesting the Gov should break the law to steal property as to solve a local supply /demand issue in Irish schools which is been addressed by civilised negotiation. This is not 1910s Russia. The Trusts are perfectly legal and even if they weren't present I don't think it would change a lot as most of the schools are not owned by the Orders paying the compensation bill.

robindch

robp wrote: »

Your basically suggesting the Gov should break the law to steal property as to solve a local supply /demand issue in Irish schools which is been addressed by civilised negotiation.

I believe trusts can be dissolved, perfectly legally, by an order of the High Court (though I'm not fully sure how the legislation governing this can be applied to the religious trusts which control access to schools.

robp wrote: »

This is not 1910s Russia.

Tell that to the peasants who voted to maintain a discriminatory school system overseen by an organization with the Catholic Church's record of child-care.

Zamboni

robp wrote: »

Your basically suggesting the Gov should break the law to steal property as to solve a local supply /demand issue in Irish schools which is been addressed by civilised negotiation. This is not 1910s Russia. The Trusts are perfectly legal and even if they weren't present I don't think it would change a lot as most of the schools are not owned by the Orders paying the compensation bill.

I pay extra taxes because priests raped children. Let that sink in for a minute.

I would have no issue with the state doing whatever is necessary to squeeze every last cent out of any of those orders or their asset protection scams.

Greenmachine

Take every last penny off the church.

jank

Welcome news that people are getting a choice in their schooling. It is clear that some areas want to keep the church somewhat involved in the primary school system while others want change. What is apparent is that most parents dont care either way as I presume their focus in on the actual standard of education their children are getting.

within each area the responses only varied from 13pc to 26pc

I wonder how the handover will be managed; will the state have to pay out the church to take over the school buildings? Start paying rent? There will I imagine be some sort of financial compensation, which might be unpalatable for some but we don’t nor do we want to live in a country where mob rules apply.

Peregrinus

jank wrote: »

I wonder how the handover will be managed; will the state have to pay out the church to take over the school buildings? Start paying rent? There will I imagine be some sort of financial compensation, which might be unpalatable for some but we don’t nor do we want to live in a country where mob rules apply.

It looks to me as if the handover will be quite complex.

The threshold for recommending a non-denominational school is the parents of 80-100 children indicating that they would choose such a school. That would be the smallest viable school; a four-teacher, four-classroom school.

The thing is, in most of the areas where a transfer is to happen, there is no four-teacher, four-classroom campus. The school that is handed over is very possibly going to have to get smaller at least initially. That means other schools will have to get bigger. That could mean that the handed-over school has vacant classrooms and underused facilitities, while money has to be spend building extra classrooms in one or more of the other schools. Or, one of the other schools will be split between two campuses, with part of the school sharing a campus with the non-denominational school, which won’t have a campus of its own.

For the same reason, teachers are going to have to transfer. The handed-over school may have to shed teachers, while other schools will have to recruit. The other schools may not like to be told that they must hire the teachers shed by the handed-over school. Or, the teachers concerned may not like that. Expect the INTO to have, and to voice, strong opinions on this issue; similarly the boards of management of all the schools will have opinions about how they should choose which teachers to let go, or to recruit, as the case may be.

And of course pupils are going to have to transfer. If one school in the district is handed over, it’s likely that a majority of the parents in that school actually prefer denominational patronage, and some of those may seek to transfer their children. Conversely, a majority - probably a large majority - of the parents who prefer non-denominational patronage will currently have children in other schools; they’ll have to transfer to get the patronage they want (and many of them may not be prepared to do so).

So, basically, there’s going to have to be quite significant exchanges of pupils and of teachers, and a good degree of flexibility over school-splitting and campus sharing, and probably bit of money spent on building extra classrooms, etc, where they are needed.

In amongst all this is the question of who is going to own what property. I suspect, in fact, that that will be dealt with in a way which helps to solve some of the other issues, e.g. the state will buy the land on which stands the transferred school, with the sale proceeds being used to pay the cost of some of the other issues, such as erecting extra classrooms elsewhere. Or, the land will be transferred for free, or a nominal amount, in return for a state commitment to pay for extra teachers/extra facilities in the other schools.

Peregrinus

Kiwi in IE wrote: »

I found that one of the questions in the survey was slightly misleading actually. After asking what type of school patronage you would prefer, the next question was "Will you use this school?". I answered yes for the sake of the greater good and any future children we may have, but in reality the answer is no, as Little Kiwi starts junior infants in September. If they were to sort out an ET by September then yes, we would use it. However if he had been in the COI school for 2 years when one opened, and was happy there, I would not move him. Many other parents likely feel the same and would have used an ET had there been one, but are not going to move their 8 year old out of their current school if one opens.

The survey is therefore really only relevant to parents of preschool children. What of those who will become parents for the first time in the coming years. It should have been open to everyone of voting age!

Fair point. (Although I note your own rebuttal of the point too!)

I think the survey was designed to identify current or imminent demand for non-denominational schools; hence it focussed on the parents of children now in primary school or pre-school. They don’t want to go to a lot of grief and expense to transfer a school to non-denominational patronage and then have it sit half-empty for years while they wait for the children who will eventually populate it to be conceived. The threshold they have chosen for recommending at transfer is at the lowest end of the range of viability (and in fact is a size of school which in most other countries would be regarded as non-viable). That, obviously, works in favour of the greatest number of transfer recommendations. But the downside is that there’s very little room for slippage in there; they really need 80-100 pupils to populate the school in fairly short order, so they can’t count kids who are years off school yet, or who are still unborn.

As your own post indicates, even some parents who feel strongly about this won’t, in fact, transfer their children to the non-denominational school. If kids are already in school, settled, happy and doing well, parents will think twice about transferring them, and many will decide not to. On the other hand, for the same reason parents who have a preference for denominational patronage but whose children are in the transferred school may opt to leave them there. So it may be some years before the transferred schools are actually largely populated by children whose parents actively want non-denominational patronage. In the meantime, expect some pressure from the parents who prefer denominational patronage (who may well be a majority of the parents initially) for the transferred school to continue to accommodate religious education and/or sacramental preparation in one way or another!

Excitin’ times ahead, I think.

Nodin

robp wrote: »

Your basically suggesting the Gov should break the law to steal property as to solve a local supply /demand issue in Irish schools which is been addressed by civilised negotiation. ......

No, I think the suggestion is that schools be used against the churches debt to the state.

Peregrinus

Nodin wrote: »

No, I think the suggestion is that schools be used against the churches debt to the state.

"The church" is a fairly nebulous concept. Since the Reformation, "the Church" has had no legal existence, personality or capacity in Ireland. "The church" can no more have a debt to the state than "the femininist movement" can. Nor can it own property.

What you have is various church bodies which may own property, and which may have debts to the state - the Irish branches of various religious orders, for example, or church-affiliated organisations like the Vincent de Paul or Trocaire or Veritas. And if a body which had a debt to the state also owns property - e.g. a school - which the state desires, then no doubt something can be arranged whereby the debt is satisfied, or partly satisfied, by the transfer of the property.

However we have no reason to suppose that the particular national schools to be transferred belong to bodies which are indebted to the state. Most Catholic national schools belong to various diocesan trusts, which were set up in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century as a practical mechanism by which the Catholic dioceses could own and control property (given that they were unable to own them directly). It's possible that some of those dioceses are indebted to the state, and of course there may be some obligation to repay school capital grants if a property ceases to be used as a school. But if you are thinking of debts arising out of child abuse compensation claims, I think most of those are owed by various religious orders, which are separate from the dioceses and not controlled by them. It's possible that some of those orders own national schools which are now to be transferred, but that's not going to be so in more than a small proportion of cases.

As Robin points out above, trusts can be dissolved by the High Court, but not on a whim; there needs to be a legal basis for dissolution. And "the State wants to seize the property in the trust" is not going to be enough.

I don't think the state can attempt to seize the property of A in order to satisfy the debts of B, on the basis that both A and B are Catholics, and still claim to be a state which take the rule of law seriously. Any attempt to do so would almost certainly be frustrated by the courts - if not by the Irish courts, then by the European Court of Human Rights. This is going nowhere, and the Department is not going to attempt it. However the financial and property complications of transferring national schools are resolved, it will by something which is at least plausibly constitutional, and respectful of the rule of law.

Kiwi in IE

I had mentally prepared myself for Little Kiwi to start the COI school in September, there is no way around that, since it is April already, even if an ET was going to open in our area. My problem with this though is that now any future children we may have will also have to attend a religious school as long as we live here.

The local COI school currently has a lovely, liberal principal, there is a lack of emphasis on religion, and religious rituals carried out by COI are done outside school time as extra curricular. She could retire in 5 years and be replaced by a religious fanatic!

Nodin

Peregrinus wrote: »

"The church" (.....) of law.

Where such bodies do exist that have schools in their poessesion and that have a debt to the state, it makes sense these should be used against payment due. Happy now?

Nodin

Kiwi in IE wrote: »

I had mentally prepared myself for Little Kiwi to start the COI school in September, .......

As long as she never takes soup off them, the effect shouldn't be permanent.

Rev Hellfire

Nodin wrote: »

No, I think the suggestion is that schools be used against the churches debt to the state.

I'd imagine that most school properties have been legally ring fenced at this stage to prevent such a thing from happening.

iguana

Peregrinus wrote: »

No, no. Your methodology is all wrong. It’s 38 districts, not 38 schools. There are many more than 38 schools in the districts concerned (but we don’t know how many more).

In 23 out of 38 districts where the consultation was held, there was sufficient support for a non-denominational school to lead the Department to conclude that one school in the district should be transferred from church patronage to non-denominational patronage.

“Sufficient support” means that the parents of (at least) 80 to 100 pupils indicated a preference for a non-denominational school. Since some parents have more than one child, that could be less than 80 to 100 parents.

We can’t express this as a percentage of the parents voting, since (a) we don’t know how many parents voted for non-denominational patronage; we only know that in 23 out of 38 districts it was at least the parents of 80 children. But even if we knew exactly how many parents voted that way, we still couldn’t express it as a percentage, since (b) we don’t know the total number of parents or pupils in each of the 23 districts.

What we do know is that, in the 38 districts, 10,700 parents voted, and this was reportedly less than a quarter of the parents who could have voted. It’s not difficult to calculate that you could have the parents of 80-100 children in 23 of the districts voting for a non-denominational school, and the total vote for non-denominational schools could be substantially less than 60% of the parents voting, never mind of the parents who could vote. If we assume that 60 parents could represent 80 children, then in theory the vote for non-denominational schools could have been as low as

(60 x 23)/10,700

which is not quite 13% of those who voted, or a little over 4% of those who were entitled to vote.

That’s the lowest it could have been. In fact I’m sure the vote for non-denominational patronage was much higher than that – in those 23 districts at least 60 parents voted for non-denominational schools, but the figure could have been much higher than that, plus of course in the other 15 districts something less than 60 parents voted for non-denominational schools, and they have to be counted as well. But there’s no basis for your figure of 60%.

I'm curious as to how these polls were publicised. I am a parent in one of the districts polled (my son will be 5 in 2017) and the only way I knew about it was that someone on this forum published a link. I checked and saw that I was eligible to take part, so did. If I hadn't read a particular thread here, I wouldn't have had a clue about it.

recedite

Peregrinus wrote: »

parents who have a preference for denominational patronage but whose children are in the transferred school may opt to leave them there. So it may be some years before the transferred schools are actually largely populated by children whose parents actively want non-denominational patronage. In the meantime, expect some pressure from the parents who prefer denominational patronage (who may well be a majority of the parents initially) for the transferred school to continue to accommodate religious education and/or sacramental preparation in one way or another!

It won't be a problem for those parents because basic "religion" will still be taught as a subject, and their kids won't be exposed to any particular indoctrination they don't believe in. Absence of indoctrination is not a problem for most parents, even the religious ones. Kids of RC persuasion can join in with kids from a nearby RC school for their first communions; this is already standard practice for RC kids attending ET and C of I schools.

The issue of who owns the school properties is something of a red herring, because the cost of running a school and paying the teacher's salaries is massive in comparison to most of the site values. Even if the State purchases the actual buildings, it is far more valuable to the RCC to have the State pay for the upkeep of schools under their control, than to receive that small once-off cash payment. Controlling schools is key to maintaining power and status in the community, for any religion.

jank

Nodin wrote: »

Where such bodies do exist that have schools in their poessesion and that have a debt to the state, it makes sense these should be used against payment due. Happy now?

How many schools would that be?

Peregrinus

jank wrote: »

How many schools would that be?

We don't know. While there at 23 areas where it is recommended that one school be transferred, the 23 schools to be transferred have not been identified. Consequently we don't know who owns them, and whether the owners have an abuse-related debt to the state.

But, realistically, it will not be more than a couple of schools, and could well be none. The great bulk of Catholic national schools are formally owned by diocesan property trusts, and so far as I know none of the dioceses have abuse-related debts to the state.

MrPudding

robp wrote: »

Your basically suggesting the Gov should break the law to steal property as to solve a local supply /demand issue in Irish schools which is been addressed by civilised negotiation. This is not 1910s Russia. The Trusts are perfectly legal and even if they weren't present I don't think it would change a lot as most of the schools are not owned by the Orders paying the compensation bill.

See, it would not be breaking the law. Unless the law of trust is wildly different in Ireland to how it is in the UK, which I doubt, there would be no law breaking, quite the opposite in fact.


Trusts are governed by equity. Equity has a number of maxims, one of which the church, by its actions, seems to have offended. This maxim goes something like this:

“He who comes into equity must come with clean hands.”

This simply means that if you have any dishonest or illegal intentions when you use equity, say setting up a trust to move your property into so you can avoid paying money you owe, then equity will not be available to you. You will be able to go through the process and set up the trust and even move you property into it, however, if it is challenged and it is found that you, for example, transferred the property so you did not have to pay compensation for the acts of child rape that your employees committed, then it is as if the trust never existed.

So if we take this and apply it to the behaviour of the church in Ireland it seems reasonable that many of the property transfers the various diocese and religious orders made to avoid paying the compensation they promise to pay could be nullified. These properties could then be used to pay off the debt those organisations owe to the state and the taxpayer. The easiest way to do this might be to turn the schools over to the state and they could then be credited for the value.

No illegal seizing of property required. Simply the reversal of a despicable and cynical scheme by a despicable organisation to avoid paying compensation to children that were raped by their employees.

I presume you agree that children that were raped should receive compensation? I further presume that you would not support actions taken by an organisation to avoid paying such compensation?

MrP

Morag

Whom are they handing them over too?
The VEC? cos they run schools with a catholic/christian those and when they say multidenominational they mean the schools are geared towards all sorts of christian children.

recedite

Morag wrote: »

Whom are they handing them over too?
The VEC? cos they run schools with a catholic/christian those and when they say multidenominational they mean the schools are geared towards all sorts of christian children.

Check out "table 4" in the link below. (The overview of the report is quite short, there is no need to look at the reports for each individual area)
The VEC got a dismal share of the vote compared to ET. The only areas where people voted in any numbers for a VEC primary school were the areas where ET was not on the list of options (shown as N/A) because there was already an ET school in the area (along with numerous religious schools)
I think this demonstrates that the VEC "Christian" model is not seen by parents as a genuine or realistic alternative to a traditional religious school.

koth wrote: »

For anyone who is interested, link to the PDF of the report (all 203 pages of it).

Nodin

jank wrote: »

How many schools would that be?

No idea.