Bishop Leo O’Reilly, who is head of the Catholic Bishops’ commission on education, wrote a lucid and timely piece in the Irish Times yesterday in response to a poll carried in that paper suggesting that a majority of people wished to see the State wholly take over Catholic primary schools. 

In the course of the article Bishop O’Reilly wrote that parental choice is “surely the central issue at stake, not whether the church or the State should have control of primary schools, as was pointed out by the Iona Institute in its response to the Irish Times survey”.