Bishop Leo O’Reilly, the chairman of the Catholic bishops commission on education, has expressed surprise at a speech by Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe last Friday in which he said his department “will shortly be providing an initial list of about 10 urban areas that can be used to test the concept of reducing the number of Catholic schools”.

Speaking in Maynooth yesterday, at the beginning of the Irish Bishops’ Conference three-day spring meeting, Bishop O’Reilly said the Minister and his Department officials met last November to discuss the transfer of schools, according to an Irish Times report.

At this meeting, he said, it was agreed the Department of Education would conduct research on areas where a reduction in the number of Catholic schools could be tested, and would then get in touch with the bishops.

Bishop O’Reilly said that this had not happened, even though Fr Michael Drumm, executive chairman of the Catholic Schools Partnership, had been appointed as liaison person by the church on the matter.

“It came as a bit of a surprise, in that sense,” Bishop O’Reilly said.

Mr O’Keeffe was speaking in Dublin to the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association.

Asked about the Minister’s mention “of an eventual reduction of Catholic provision in demographically stable urban areas to 60 per cent”, Bishop O’Reilly said “I don’t know where that came from”. He felt such a figure “would vary greatly between the city and the country”.

On the same issue, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said he was “happy, provided that consultation takes place. The big difficulty is that it isn’t just about buildings. It’s about a reorientation of schools’ ethos but also rights of parents and rights of teachers”.