Handing over schools currently run by the Church to “complex State bureaucracies whose efficiency has certainly yet to be proven” is not the way forward for Irish education, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said.
Speaking on Sunday at the McGill Summer School, Dr Martin said that the situation in which the Church took over responsibility for running most schools and hospitals in Ireland was an anomaly.
But the answer to this was not a simple transfer of control of these bodies to State control, he said. Non-profit models, he said, could “provide certain services in a more efficient way than business or the State”.
His remarks come amid a continuing debate about the future of denominational education. In the wake of the Ryan report, there were a number of calls for a transfer of ownership of religious-run schools into the ownership of the State.
Government Chief Whip Pat Carey and Labour’s education spokesperso Ruairi Quinn both said that the State would ultimately have to take ownership of all primary schools in the State.
However, a poll conducted by Red C, and commissioned by the Iona Institute last month showed that only one-in-four people want the State to take over the country’s schools and nearly three quarters believe that parents should have the right to choose denominational education for their children.
The findings were virtually identical to the results of a similar poll carried out on behalf of the Institute last year.
Dr Martin also said that, while the Church needed to avoid “any temptation to maintain an attitude of dominance”, this did not mean giving “a sort of blessing to a more secular vision of Ireland”.
Many sectors of secular Ireland, he said “also have to find new ways of addressing their own historical hangovers about faith and learn to relate in an adult way with the place of religious belief in society”.
A vital democracy, he added “must find ways in which the values, including the religious values, of all are welcomed and cherished”.