The Department of Education is currently running a sort of Citizens’ Assembly on education called the ‘Convention [1] on Education’. It is supposed to help shape Irish education for decades to come. The most recent session last month featured a panel on “School Values and Culture”, on which no representative of the Churches was present, despite the fact that the Churches (theoretically, anyway) are the dominant players in Irish schools. A strange oversight, you might say.
The Convention invites experts to speak to a selected group of 150 stakeholders (teachers, parents, students) and these later make recommendations to the Government. The reason this is so Citizens’ Assembly-like is because this is exactly what took place at those carefully stage-managed meetings at which delegates were effectively channelled towards a particular, favoured outcome.
The session last month, which took place in Sligo, began with videos from BelongTo, an LGBTQ+ youth organisation, and from the Traveller community, to introduce the panel discussion on “School Values and Culture”. They set the tone of the meeting.
As mentioned, the panel had no representatives from the Churches, but it did manage to include the principal of an Educate Together school in Lucan and a principal of a multi-denominational school in Cork. Also on the panel were Dr Ebun Joseph, the Special Rapporteur on Racial Equality and Racism, and David Joyce of Pavee Point, a lobby group for Travellers. It should be noted that Joseph is a subscriber to so-called ‘critical race theory’, which essentially posits that society is structurally racist and therefore needs to be reorganised from top to bottom.
This very much had the look of a ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) panel, and it was obviously deemed by the organisers that the Churches could make no real contribution to such a discussion, whereas Educate Together could.
The omission is remarkable because Department of Education figures show that almost 95pc of primary schools and about 50pc of secondary schools have a religious ethos.
And what is “ethos”? Again, the Department [2] gives us the answer: it is the “morals, values and beliefs” of a school.
So, a national panel on school values and culture discussed precisely the subject that lies at the heart of religious-school ethos, while giving no platform to anyone representing the schools that make up the overwhelming majority of the primary sector, and also a significant component of the secondary sector.
Earlier this year, Independent TD Carol Nolan raised questions [3] in the Dáil about the organisation contracted to facilitate the Convention. She asked what safeguards had been put in place to guarantee the objectivity and neutrality of the facilitation and note-taking process. She raised concerns about what she described as the organisation’s links with activist campaigns.
The issue is not whether representatives of Catholic or Protestant education are members of the Convention. Some are. The issue is who is chosen to frame the discussion when the Convention turns to something as fundamental as values, culture and ethos.
We know that Citizens’ Assemblies are not representative of the general population. You might remember that in 2024 the electorate overwhelmingly rejected a referendum proposal that arose from the Citizens’ Assembly’s recommendation to ditch the woman-in-the-home clause from the Constitution.
The organisers of the Convention might well have thought that the Churches couldn’t really make a proper contribution to a panel discussion that was really all about ‘DEI’, because the Churches are perceived as being anti-DEI, whereas Educate Together schools are seen as DEI’s embodiment.
If the Convention believes that Protestant and Catholic schools are not ‘inclusive’ enough, then we have a problem. Will more pressure be brought to bear on those schools to water down their ethos even further, regardless of what parents might actually want?
If Church representatives had been on the panel, they could have told delegates that they already do a fine job of being welcoming to all pupils while at the same time being Protestant or Catholic, as the case may be.
Finally, how inclusive is a panel on education that leaves Church spokespeople out? Not very, one would have thought.