The Irish Times has carried yet another article calling for an end to publicly-funded denominational education. It argues that Ireland should copy Quebec if it wants to end its “patronage problem”. Through an Act of Parliament, highly secular Quebec basically brought a shuddering halt to public funding of denominational schools 16 years ago.
The article [1], by Karin Fischer, author of ‘Separate but Equal? Schools and the Politics of Religion and Diversity in the Republic of Ireland’ is littered with mistakes and false assumptions. Let’s look at a few of them.
The biggest false assumption is that there is huge demand for an end to public funding of faith schools. There isn’t. Under the last Government, the Department of Education surveyed parents in 40 plus areas around the country involving more than 200 primary schools and at a stretch found enough demand for a hand-over of only 10 percent of those schools to other patron bodies like Educate Together.
Fischer quotes a former head of the National Parents Council who said that education in schools belongs to “us, the citizens of Ireland”, not to the various patrons, including the various Churches.
This begs the question, who is the “us” here? It assumes that we citizens are a monolithic block all desiring the same kind of education for our children. That is patently false. Irish parents do not want a one-size-fits-all education system. The type of schools we have must be led by parental demand and parental choice. There will be plenty of demand for publicly-funded faith schools even after a percentage of those schools have been given to other patron bodies. Why does Karen Fischer think she has a right to deprive parents of the right to send their children to publicly-funded denominational schools?
Notably, Fischer pays no attention at all to the fact that in many other countries, publicly-funded denominational education exists. One example is England. A third of publicly-funded primary schools in England are faith schools-funded and they are extremely popular with the public. This is one reason why British Prime Minister, Theresa May, has announced that more publicly-funded faith schools are to be built. They are very popular and they are also very good.
Fischer claims Pope Francis in support of her position. Pope Francis gave an interview [2] recently to the French Catholic paper, La Croix, in which he expressed his opposition to ‘confessional states’. That is a very long way from opposing public funding of Church-run schools. In fact, in the same interview, Pope Francis also said that he believes French secularism (‘laicité’) goes too far.
Despite this, the French State does in fact give funding to Church schools. (See here [3]). The French State pays the salaries of teachers working in private schools, and that includes Church schools. Fischer ought to have pointed this out.
(Quebec is guilty of exactly the sort of exaggerated secularism the Pope speaks of. A few years ago there was a push to ban State employees from wearing religious garb such as the head scarf, a skull-cap or a turban via something called the ‘Charter of Quebec Values’).
Finally, were we to go down the Quebec route, we would almost certainly need to have a constitutional referendum. Fischer didn’t point this out either.
I suppose Fischer would concede that exclusively privately-funded denominational education would exist in her world, but only a few could afford to send their children to them if they receive no public support.
In Fischer’s world, denominational education would be a shriveled thing, accessible for the most part only to the relatively affluent.