School patronage

The recent statement by Archbishop of Dublin Dermot Farrell that evidence of Christian belief in Ireland today has for all intents and purposes vanished highlights the problem faced by those of us tasked with the management of Catholic schools. What are the implications for our core responsibility for transmission of faith?

But we need to liberate those many teachers whose authenticity is undermined in the minds and hearts of their students when they have to pretend to carry out the task of faith formation they do not believe in.

Living abroad, he walked tall. He laughed a lot, had a certain ease about him. Within weeks of moving back to Ireland, he began to keep his head down. He kept his coat on, fully zipped up. He got sad.

Aged eight, my boy started his life in Ireland in Communion year in the local Catholic school. He spent up to an hour a day at the back of the class whilst the rest of the students prepared for the sacrament. He was given pictures, often holy pictures, to colour in. When they went to the church, he was offered the Bible to read. When the priest came to visit, he stayed in the classroom. He just didn’t put his hand up.

The school was lovely. There was no malice in anyone. But my son felt left behind, different, lacking.

We moved him to a multi-denominational school the following year. We were lucky to have the option of a move, but it was across the city. He has few local friends now. He can’t walk home from school like other children in his community.

Is this experience usual? It’s hard to believe it is. Over 90 per cent of our primary schools are under Catholic patronage and spend up to 2½ hours a week teaching religion or faith formation; yet our population is growing ever more diverse.

In practice, however, surveys indicate that many faith-based schools offer little in the way of detail on opt-out arrangements. In many cases, say schools, they do not have the resources for alternative classes, so many remain doing the classes or colouring while others learn.

Opt Out Rights is a newly-formed group of teachers, principals, parents, and academics who are concerned over what they describe as the lack of an effective option.

Numerous principals of Catholic schools declined to comment on the record when approached.

One who spoke on condition of anonymity said that, in practice, they have been making extensive efforts to ensure all pupils are welcome and have been doing so for decades.

“One of the great successes of modern Ireland is how many people from different cultures and languages have been welcomed and integrated into Ireland; Catholic schools have been key to that and have really stepped up the mark,” says one Catholic primary school principal.

“It’s just not my experience that non-Catholics are excluded in any way or stuck at the bottom of the class colouring . . . most non-Catholics are happy for them to learn the patron’s programme, because at the end of the day it’s about love and understanding.”

Another principal, however, acknowledges that faith and patron’s programmes can be an obstacle, especially with the time dedicated to Communion and Confirmation.

“Our primary schools are just very Catholic in the language we use, in our rituals, in our school calendar. Our big events are Christmas and Easter and of course the sacraments. We’re just busy getting on with it,” the principal says.

“Most schools would be happy to change. That is, the teachers would be happy to change. You have progressive priests out there too. But they all answer to the diocese and the bishop, and the Church is highly sensitive to any criticism, so their hands are tied.”

 The UN must raise the issue of religious discrimination Irish schools with the Dublin Government, Atheist Ireland has said.

“Ireland is no longer a Catholic country. We are now a pluralist country with Catholic laws that we are gradually dismantling. The most important next step is removing the anachronistic control that the Catholic Church has over the education of our children,” it said in a statement.

It follows a report in Monday’s Irish Times which said “slow” progress was being made in providing access to multi-denominational education in the State with new figures showing that Catholic schools account for 89 per cent of primary schools in the state.

These new figures shows that, despite a Government commitment to provide 400 multi-denominational primary schools by 2030, there are currently 164 multi-denominational schools in Ireland compared with 2,750 Catholic primary schools in Ireland.

“Even if they existed, having 400 multi-denominational schools would not solve the problem, as most parents would not be able to access these schools,” Atheist Ireland said. It also pointed out that “multi-denominational schools are still religious schools. They do not respect the freedom of conscience of atheist families.”

What was needed, it said, were “non-denominational schools, which treat everyone equally and do not promote either religion or atheism”. As “an immediate step” Irish schools “must allow children to leave the classroom during religion class”, it said.

The group has made a complaint to the Irish Comptroller and Auditor General about this “as schools that receive public funding are constitutionally obliged to do this”, it said. It has also complained to the Comptroller about what it describes as “the misuse of public funds regarding the teaching of religion in Irish schools”.

It has asked the UN to raise with the Irish Government the issue in schools of a “right to objective sex education, and section 37 of the Employment Equality Act, which allows publicly funded schools to discriminate against teachers on the ground of religion”.

In a statement, the department said 400 multi-denominational primary schools by 2030 remained the Government’s objective.

It said almost 100 new primary and post-primary have been established since 2011 with a multi-denominational ethos.

A further 20 new multi-denominational primary schools have been established under the patronage divestment process and a more recent “reconfiguration” process.

Four years ago the department requested Education and Training Boards to identify pilot areas where there was likely to be unmet demand for multi-denominational education and to conduct surveys of pre-school parents in these areas.

The department has refused to release the findings of these surveys to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act.

The core of the plan to deal with this incongruity was so-called voluntary divestment. The church would gradually hand schools over to other patrons such as Educate Together.

I wrote here at the time that this plan was “disastrous” and would result in at best 50 of the then 3,169 Catholic primary schools becoming multidenominational. This was not a blinding insight – it was patently evident that the church would make only the most token efforts at divestment.

And so it has turned out. In 2012, 91 per cent of primary schools were Catholic. In 2022 the figure is 89 per cent. My bleak suggestion that a mere 50 schools might be divested was overly optimistic. The number of new multidenominational schools created under the divestment process stands at 20.

In the decade since the divestment policy was created, we’ve had referendums on same-sex marriage and abortion, both of which suggested that Irish society no longer wished to define itself as Catholic. In 2020, 42 per cent of weddings in Ireland were civil ceremonies; just 35 per cent were Catholic.

Practising Catholics – defined as those who attend Mass every week – now make up just 27 per cent of the population. And since many of those are older people, it seems highly likely that they form a lower proportion of parents with children of primary school-going age.

Even the Catholic bishops increasingly recognise that the church now lacks the institutional capacity to manage primary schools. Last year the Bishop of Clonfert, Michael Duignan, asked rhetorically, “Can we continue to act as patron of so many primary schools?”

Yet the Government pretends it can manage this major change with minor measures. The official aspiration right now is to have 400 multidenominational primary schools by 2030. Even if that target is reached (and this is highly doubtful), it will still amount to a small fraction of the 2,750 Catholic schools.

And what continues to happen inside schools – especially in rural areas where parents have no real choice about where to send their children – is that non-Catholic children have to be segregated from their classmates for significant amounts of time during the day when religious instruction is in progress. (In the developed world, only Israel devotes more time to religion in primary school than Ireland does.)

Sir, – Article 44: 4 of the Constitution is clear when it states that “denominational management” must not “affect prejudicially the right of any child to attend a school receiving public money without attending religious instruction at that school”. I would suggest that frequent recourse to the rather numinous notion of “ethos” by denominational managers does “affect prejudicially” the right of many children to vindicate this explicit constitutional entitlement.

In addition, Article 44:2 of the Constitution – which may seem to be at variance with historical practice – quite properly “guarantees” that the State will not “endow any religion”. In the interest of social harmony and cohesion, it is imperative that the funding of sectarian indoctrination by the State must be phased out as quickly as possible. The State should have no role in subventing sectarian “faith” schools or maintaining their sectarian “ethos”. If religionists wish to establish “faith” schools, their right to do so is guaranteed under the Constitution. But these institutions should not be funded by the State in any way.

If parents wish to indoctrinate their children, they are free to do so in their churches, mosques, synagogues, mandirs and temples. Indoctrination, no matter how nuanced or elliptical, has no place in any educational system.

Given the cultural and political importance of religions, though, some account has to be taken of them educationally. However, this should not be done in a proselytising context. Religions and their mythologies are best studied critically, philosophically, and anthropologically in relation to the social and historical circumstances which gave rise to them.

This would not in any way inhibit the constitutional right of any citizen to practice their religion as they see fit but would rather promote a greater understanding of the way in which these frequently divisive belief systems came into being and evolved.

As an academic discipline, comparative religion is a fascinating and rewarding field of study. “Faith” is another matter entirely. – Yours, etc,

PAUL McGUIRK,

Dalkey,

Co Dublin.