Educate Together
and the Irish Vocational Education Association (IVEA) have clashed at the Forum
on the future of Catholic schools over whether children should be taught their
own religion during school hours or after school.

This is a crucial issue because it will determine how religion is to be taught in
those schools that transfer from Catholic patronage to other patron bodies in
the future.

In Educate
Together schools children are taught ethics and comparative religion during
school time but can only be taught their own religion after school hours.

In the
handful of new VEC-run primary school, the children are taught their own
religion in school time in separate groups.

Educate
Together believes this is impractical and divisive, but the IVEA told the Forum
it was “overly restrictive” for religious instruction to take place outside the
school day and that it interfered with the rights of parents who wanted it.

One VEC
school in Dublin 15 – which has a big immigrant population – is Scoil Colm. A
quarter of its pupils are Catholic, 14pc are Orthodox Christian, 31pc other
Christian, 29pc are Muslim and “a handful” are Hindu, Buddhist or Humanist.

They are religion
taught in four groups; Catholic, non-Catholic Christian, Muslim, and
non-theist.

Marie
Griffin of the IVEA said that children moved around the school for various
subjects and “it is the same for religion”.

The head of
Educate Together, Paul Rowe, also told the Forum that “very, very few people in
Ireland want their children educated in an environment without a belief system”.

According
to The Irish Times, he said: “Our experience is that it is an absolutely
minimal demand in the Irish context”.

The purpose
of the Forum is to work out a mechanism for the orderly transfer of an as yet
to be determined number of Catholic school to other patron bodies in response
to public demand for new types of schools.

Currently,
more than 90pc of Irish primary schools are Catholic-run.

The Forum
has been holding public meetings since Wednesday. They end today at 1.45. They
have been poorly attended.