(pictured).
Le Chéile Schools
Trust, a Catholic organisation, will have responsibility for a school in
Mulhuddart, Dublin 15, which is set to open in September
2014.
The Department also
announced that a new Church of Ireland school was to be established in
Greystones, Co. Wicklow, which is also set to open in September
2014.
Minister for
Education Ruairí Quinn announced the patrons for 14 new post-primary schools
last week. For the first time, Educate Together will run a secondary school, in
Blanchardstown, west Dublin, and will share patronage of a school in Drogheda,
Co Louth, with Co Louth Vocational Education Committee
(VEC).
Some eight other
schools will also be under the care of VECs in Dublin, Galway, Kildare, Meath
and Cork. Gaelscoileanna body An Foras Pátrúnachta will become patron to two
schools
Mr Quinn said he was
“pleased that for the first time in a generation a new Catholic and a new Church
of Ireland voluntary secondary school are to open. This demonstrates clearly
that I and the Department are committed to
diversity of ethos and respect for parental choice”.
The establishment of
a new Catholic school after over 20 years comes after the Department was
criticised for failing to provide new school places for Catholic
parents.
In March of last
year, Mr Noel Merrick,the president of the Association of Management of Catholic
Secondary Schools (AMCSS/JMB), 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 the AMCSS had not
highlighted 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.