In his Irish Times column this week, Fintan O’Toole expresses the opinion that there is an inconsistency between Church-run schools prioritising children of their own faith in the event of overcrowding, but not doing so when Church-run hospitals are overcrowded. Actually, there isn’t. The key is what is and isn’t necessary to uphold the ethos and founding purpose of an organisation.

All organisations are governed by some kind of ethos and purpose, including The Irish Times.

A big part of the purpose of Church schools is to educate children of their own community in their particular beliefs and ethos.

You could argue that a Catholic (or Protestant) school should not in the first instance seek to educate children from the faith community it was founded to serve, but this would attack one of its key foundational purposes.

The purpose of a hospital is first and foremost to heal, not educate (O’Toole does acknowledge this, but doesn’t properly develop the argument). It will make no difference to the primary goal of a Church-run hospital if all of its patients are atheists. Nor will it make any difference to the atheists so long as they get the treatment they need. The purpose of the hospital remains the same; to heal.

But it would make a difference to the ethos of (say) a Catholic hospital if it was asked to perform actions contrary to its ethos, acts that harm rather than heal, for instance, assisted suicide.

To cut a long story short, it makes no difference to the ethos of a Church-run hospital whether all of its patients are members of its faith, or none. But it would make a difference to a Protestant school (say) if all of its children are members of its own religion or none because if it didn’t get to educate Protestant children in their own faith, a Protestant school would have little point.