The State has “by far the greatest say in what goes on in Catholic and in all other schools”, 
according to the Chair of the Catholic hierarchy’s Council for Education, Bishop Brendan Kelly.
Speaking yesterday in Waterford at the launch of Catholic Schools Week, he said, “The control [by the Church] card has been vastly overplayed by our critics, in Dáil Éireann and in newspaper columns particularly.”
He also said that the Catholic Church continues to “stand firmly behind the constitutional guarantee of the right of parents to have the education they desire for their children.”
The bishop reiterated that the Church supported diversity of provision, and remained in discussion with the Department of Education on the question of divesting schools for the sake of the good in our society.
The Church, he stated, was “very happy to work alongside the Department for the good of all our pupils, citizens along with their families of this thankfully democratic state”.
He said: “This has always been our position. And likewise we have always worked side by side with other partners in education, such as Teacher Unions, too, for the sake of the good of all the students of our land and so that this country will deliver an education second to none to all students.”
He also addressed the suggestion that the amount of time spent on religion was behind a serious drop in Ireland’s literacy and mathematics rankings.
He said that recent criticism at the Oireachtas Joint Committee for Education and Skills about religious instruction “made what can only be described as a spurious connection between this finding and the amount of time given in our Catholic schools to Irish and to faith formation”.
He rejected the idea “that somehow that was the remedy for the falling standards in Maths and literacy”.
He asked: “Are we to exclude the things that move our hearts most deeply and form the pillars of our Irish character and culture and conscience from our schools?. And that at the very time when many modern advanced and advancing European countries are rethinking their overly secular stances on the provision of education.”
Bishop Kelly also referred to the problems facing the country at present, specifically mentioning “very serious and growing crime and drug abuse problems” and the “severe scrutiny faced by the country’s major institutions.
There was, he said a “deep longing for renewal, for a new watering and stirring up of the soil”.
But he said that “a wholesale jettisoning of what we already have” would not lead to renewal.