The State must respect the rights of parents to choose to send their children to Catholic secondary schools, the president of the Association of Management of Catholic Secondary Schools (AMCSS/JMB) has said.

Mr Noel Merrick told delegates at the organisation’s annual conference in Killarney this week that the State need to play its part in ensuring a pluralist educational system.

Mr Merrick also pointed out that no new permanent Voluntary Secondary School has opened in over 20 years. In that time, the sector has lost 109 schools.

If it had not been for the AMCSS highlighting this fact Mr Merrick said, ”the whole Catholic community would be sleepwalking into a situation where the parents in large areas of the country would no longer have the option of a Catholic school”.He was echoing a concern that has been expressed by the Catholic bishops in recent years.

In an address in 2008, the then head of the Chairman of the Bishops’ Commission on Education, Bishop Leo O’Reilly, expressed concern at the Department’s attitude to the voluntary sector in education.

He noted that “no new voluntary secondary schools had been established for almost a generation with the exception of two small Gael Colaisti under the patronage of An Foras Pátrúnachta”.

“There seems to be a policy assumption in the Department of Education that every new school at second level should be multi-denominational,” Bishop O’Reilly said.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that Co. Leitrim will lose its only Catholic secondary school from September 2012, when the Fatima and Felim’s, in Ballinamore, currently under the joint trusteeship of the Sisters of Mercy and the Diocese of Kilmore, becomes part of a new community school.

And next September, Abbeyfeale, Limerick, loses its only Catholic secondary school when the 340-pupil St Joseph’s, previously run by the Mercy Order, becomes part of a new community college.

In September 2012, the Ard Scoil Mhuire, FCJ, in Bruff, Limerick, will close.

At yesterday’s conference, JMB/AMCSS general secretary Ferdia Kelly said last night: “There are parts of rural Ireland and areas of major population growth on the edge of large urban centres where there is no Catholic secondary school.”

He praised the tradition of Catholic secondary schools, saying that they had given education where there was no educational provision and had played a pivotal role in the Irish state, with many teachers who gave a service second to none, often spending their working lives in prefabs.

”Our schools are renewing themselves constantly and, due to a superb cohort of young people and teachers, they are centres of positive energy, of Christian hope and excellence,” he said.