1. The Church still owns the schools, and buying them would probably be extremely expensive. As long as the schools are run by religious organisations, it will be difficult to remove their influence. But because it’s the norm, there isn’t really any real pressure to do it. If the schools have been run by the church(es) for this long, why waste money changing it now?
2. According to the last census, [78% of people](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp8iter/p8iter/p8rrc/) still claim to be Catholic. There’s no reason to take the schools away from the Church when the Church has potentially three quarters of the population on their side, far more than any political party cold hope to have.
I don’t know does Fintan cover those two points. The article is pay-walled and I’m not bothered enough to try and get around it.
EDIT: I know way less than 78% of people are practising Catholics. My point is that the CSO is making the Church look a lot stronger than it actually is, giving them more sway than they deserve.
When the census comes, there is a box for ‘none’. Religious affiliation is different from personal spirituality.
[Edited for sounding like a preachy gobshite]
Cause that would cost money to change, and we tend not to like spending money on public services….
There’s 3 primary schools in my town. 2 ” Catholic” all boys and all girls. The 3rd which is a basically mixed Educate Together in all but name is still called the Protestant one.
because people still have fake baptisms and weddings “to keep mammy happy”
Largely for the same reason that the country is widely opposed to shutting down hospitals and centralising healthcare resources. It feels like the system would get worse if the change was implemented.
Firsly, a significant proportion of the electorate attended a local school which was *religiously* run. (Fintan like a lot of commentators has forgotten that there was a generally a Protestand and Catholic option for most services in Ireland.)
The issue that now arises is that the person who went to St Neutrogenas under the watchful eye of Sister Soap would like their child to get the same education that they had.
Irish schools were generally very good in the living memory of most parents with school-aged children. If you’re 55, you likely left school in and around 1985.
Corporal punishment was banned in schools in 1982.
It was made a crime in 1996.
There’s definitely a subset of people who are young enough to have school-aged kids who remember it, but they’re a small enough number.
So you’ve a historical cohort of parents who got a good education in a Catholic/Protestant school who want to ensure their children get the same education that they had.
This opens the door to the second issue.
The “best” school in Ireland is a fairly debatable tag. The general metric used is university entrants in Ireland, which tends to screw over schools in Ulster, etc, and does little to account for demographics. Are schools in wealthy suburbs actually any good, or is it merely the case that professional parents’ children are certain to go to university? Also, sending kids to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, etc, would theoretically lead to you scoring more poorly.
In any event, the “best” schools are generally speaking single-sex religiously run schools.
It’s hardly shocking to note that parents place a huge premium on their children’s future when voting. If the option is “single-sex Catholic boys school with quasi-fascist underpinnings that guarantee your son will become a chartered accountant/gauleiter” or “hippy-dippy educate together school where he’ll be big into like, music, and die in a bedsit” or “comprehensive school with the town knuckle-draggers” the reality is, parents will fight change.
There’s no grand conspiracy, no lingering Catholicism, merely small-c conservatism.
Because every time the government tries to “reform” something in this country they manage to make things even worse ?
Fintan O’Toole preaches to the choir.
A bunch of the schools that aren’t Catholic are “multi-denominational”. I don’t understand why we don’t just have schools that teach an education. Keep the fairy tales to people’s homes.
I have a few friends that work in Educate Together schools and it honestly sounds great. Not teaching religion means they can replace that time with so many other useful subjects. And none of the curriculums are dictated by the church meaning the content is solely focused on fun and education rather than a specific religion ideologies.
Not only that, the exposure to different cultures and nationalalities seems so beneficial for the kids in not excluding minorities. Can’t wait until they become more prominent in Ireland!
I have a child who will be attending primary school in 2023. The town I live in has two primary schools, both catholic. I have chosen not to christen her because of the history of how the Catholic Church treated women in Ireland and their general historical presence and what they did to the people of Ireland. I have no choice but to send her to a catholic school, the local gaelscoil is catholic and not owned by the church. I really think religion and school should be separated. If people are that passionate about religion it should be down to the parents to teach the children or for the church to put on classes to teach the children about the religion outside of schooling hours. I agree with religious education and learning about different religions and cultures etc but growing up here I was only ever taught about Catholicism and other religions were othered.
There is a vicious cycle whereby people baptise children and pretend to be christian in order to go to schools.
And.because so many folk still pretend to be christian it gives the church a hand hold to hold onto the schools.
If history has told us anything in ireland is that priests (and similar evil cunts) need to be kept a million miles away from anything to do with our children
This a nightmare for us in the north. I’ve grown up a Catholic nationalist so obviously don’t want my kids to go to a Protestant school. Problem is I’m not baptising them either. I’m afraid of how my daughter is going to feel on communion day when all the other girls are wearing their dresses and she isn’t.
The argument that publicly funded schools should be religious because they reflect the religious makeup of the population is a really strange one.
Despite its many flaws the US (which is much, much, much more religious and Christian than Ireland on the whole) aims to keep public schools completely free of religion. Religious education is then the responsibility of the parent outside of school hours with the assistance of their minister/priest/rabbi/imman/druid should they so wish. Now, this doesn’t always work and some public schools in more conservative parts of the US have seen religion creep in but on the whole it’s a decent thing to aim for.
The schooling systems in other European states are more complex with publicly funded religiously controlled schools existing in the UK but not at all in France with other countries like Germany and Italy having mandatory religious instruction in schools although the schools themselves are not controlled by religious denomination s
I think to get a fair idea of how many people identify with a religion, it is important that those who are baptized at birth without their consent and not practice their religion in anyway should tick the box, none.
Think people need to remember that although the anti-religion proponents are vocal there are still a majority of people who consider themselves Catholic in the country.
It’s fair to say that overall people’s relationship is changing with the church and has moved from becoming devout followers to becoming more ‘culturally Catholic’, for example go for christenings, weddings, Christmas & funerals but don’t follow all the teachings.
Even if we look at the abortion referendum I’m sure there was between a quarter and a third of the youngest age groups voted not to change, it’s probably fair to assume a lot (not all by any means) was influenced by religious upbringing.
The argument that states should not fund religious schools is a compelling one but not as simple as it initially seems.
Other countries like England/Australia fund religious schools without any of the issues here, they tend to have a religious ethos but a modern outlook and attract many kids of all faith and none (Catholic and CofE schools in London are immensely popular with Muslim parents for example)
Although if you were designing an education system from scratch it is unlikely religious ones would be funded there are questions over how fair it is to shut down and irrevocably change good successful schools that have been built up over generations.
The change wouldn’t happen overnight, there could be legal battles, funding issues, staff unrest and ultimately the pupils would suffer.
So would it be worth it just to avoid an hour of religion a week that kids can opt out of and usually doesn’t focus on Catholicism anyway?
Where i live there is still a huge issue with sectarianism, even the supposed Non-Dom Schools have links to Churches.
I chose to send my kids to a Catholic School because to be honest although they were baptised, go to mass on Christmas and that’s it, I wasn’t brave enough to send them to what is fundamentally a Protestant School with a recognisably Irish Surname.
Have heard locally of kids who have been bullied for the same reason, and conversely others who haven’t had an issue.
But when it’s my own kids it’s unlikely I would ever take the risk.
The Department of Education pays for the building of schools at great cost and then gives them, free, to the Catholic Church, Church of Ireland, or Educate Together patronage body. They do it every year. I don’t understand why people aren’t more annoyed by it.
If the Catholic Church want to be in the business of running schools, let them build them. State built schools should be state property.
Catholic (or any other) faith formation can take place in schools if that is the wish of the parents of the children attending but whether it’s 74% Catholic, Protestant, or Pastafarian returned on the census, there’s no reason why the Irish state should be continuing to hand multi-million euro building projects over to the Catholic Church to mind for them. We’re a country of grown-ups; we can mind our own things.
Yes, why? Separation of church and state. It’s the 21st century
I guess I am a Roman Catholic, just not a practising one. However, we need to have independent schools. If you want your kids involved in religion, fine, but do it outside of their schooling.
Because the state doesn’t want to take over.
The biggest issue has to be single sex schools. Incredibly damaging to social skills and provide an environment (in boys schools) to grow mysoginistic mindsets and ideologies
they have literally no benefit whatsoever, took me literally a year when I was 15/16 ish to be able to have a proper conversation with a girl my age because of this stupid segregation of sexes.
I’ll be telling Sister Mary Margaret what you said, I will.
Really? Ireland isn’t Catholic anymore? So why then is it that in the last census over 78% of the population identified that way?
I don’t debate the need for reform in education – but the premise for the statement is outright wrong.
Money, Fintan, but you knew that.
A far more useful, and less lazy bit of journalism would be an analysis of what it would cost to make them all secular. Start with putting a price on buying out all the buildings.
This really annoyed me …my cousin who is devout catholic but sent her kids to the nearest school an educate together. So comes to the communion and the church organised religion classes after school. This all makes sense to me but then she tells me the other parents that aren’t religious don’t want to participate in Sunday mass or religion class but they still want their kids to have their communion. That’s the problem with Ireland. Everybody wants their cake and to eat it
It doesn’t matter whether a country is Catholic or not. Schools shouldn’t be.
What’s really annoying is that there are absolutely no non-denominational schools, and the divestment proposal never considered that this was something that was needed, instead focusing on multi-denominational education. The goal should be to remove every single piece of religious dogma from schools: if you want to indoctrinate your kids in your belief system, do so outside school hours.
27 comments
2 reasons.
1. The Church still owns the schools, and buying them would probably be extremely expensive. As long as the schools are run by religious organisations, it will be difficult to remove their influence. But because it’s the norm, there isn’t really any real pressure to do it. If the schools have been run by the church(es) for this long, why waste money changing it now?
2. According to the last census, [78% of people](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp8iter/p8iter/p8rrc/) still claim to be Catholic. There’s no reason to take the schools away from the Church when the Church has potentially three quarters of the population on their side, far more than any political party cold hope to have.
I don’t know does Fintan cover those two points. The article is pay-walled and I’m not bothered enough to try and get around it.
EDIT: I know way less than 78% of people are practising Catholics. My point is that the CSO is making the Church look a lot stronger than it actually is, giving them more sway than they deserve.
When the census comes, there is a box for ‘none’. Religious affiliation is different from personal spirituality.
[Edited for sounding like a preachy gobshite]
Cause that would cost money to change, and we tend not to like spending money on public services….
There’s 3 primary schools in my town. 2 ” Catholic” all boys and all girls. The 3rd which is a basically mixed Educate Together in all but name is still called the Protestant one.
because people still have fake baptisms and weddings “to keep mammy happy”
Largely for the same reason that the country is widely opposed to shutting down hospitals and centralising healthcare resources. It feels like the system would get worse if the change was implemented.
Firsly, a significant proportion of the electorate attended a local school which was *religiously* run. (Fintan like a lot of commentators has forgotten that there was a generally a Protestand and Catholic option for most services in Ireland.)
The issue that now arises is that the person who went to St Neutrogenas under the watchful eye of Sister Soap would like their child to get the same education that they had.
Irish schools were generally very good in the living memory of most parents with school-aged children. If you’re 55, you likely left school in and around 1985.
Corporal punishment was banned in schools in 1982.
It was made a crime in 1996.
There’s definitely a subset of people who are young enough to have school-aged kids who remember it, but they’re a small enough number.
So you’ve a historical cohort of parents who got a good education in a Catholic/Protestant school who want to ensure their children get the same education that they had.
This opens the door to the second issue.
The “best” school in Ireland is a fairly debatable tag. The general metric used is university entrants in Ireland, which tends to screw over schools in Ulster, etc, and does little to account for demographics. Are schools in wealthy suburbs actually any good, or is it merely the case that professional parents’ children are certain to go to university? Also, sending kids to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, etc, would theoretically lead to you scoring more poorly.
In any event, the “best” schools are generally speaking single-sex religiously run schools.
It’s hardly shocking to note that parents place a huge premium on their children’s future when voting. If the option is “single-sex Catholic boys school with quasi-fascist underpinnings that guarantee your son will become a chartered accountant/gauleiter” or “hippy-dippy educate together school where he’ll be big into like, music, and die in a bedsit” or “comprehensive school with the town knuckle-draggers” the reality is, parents will fight change.
There’s no grand conspiracy, no lingering Catholicism, merely small-c conservatism.
Because every time the government tries to “reform” something in this country they manage to make things even worse ?
Fintan O’Toole preaches to the choir.
A bunch of the schools that aren’t Catholic are “multi-denominational”. I don’t understand why we don’t just have schools that teach an education. Keep the fairy tales to people’s homes.
I have a few friends that work in Educate Together schools and it honestly sounds great. Not teaching religion means they can replace that time with so many other useful subjects. And none of the curriculums are dictated by the church meaning the content is solely focused on fun and education rather than a specific religion ideologies.
Not only that, the exposure to different cultures and nationalalities seems so beneficial for the kids in not excluding minorities. Can’t wait until they become more prominent in Ireland!
I have a child who will be attending primary school in 2023. The town I live in has two primary schools, both catholic. I have chosen not to christen her because of the history of how the Catholic Church treated women in Ireland and their general historical presence and what they did to the people of Ireland. I have no choice but to send her to a catholic school, the local gaelscoil is catholic and not owned by the church. I really think religion and school should be separated. If people are that passionate about religion it should be down to the parents to teach the children or for the church to put on classes to teach the children about the religion outside of schooling hours. I agree with religious education and learning about different religions and cultures etc but growing up here I was only ever taught about Catholicism and other religions were othered.
There is a vicious cycle whereby people baptise children and pretend to be christian in order to go to schools.
And.because so many folk still pretend to be christian it gives the church a hand hold to hold onto the schools.
If history has told us anything in ireland is that priests (and similar evil cunts) need to be kept a million miles away from anything to do with our children
This a nightmare for us in the north. I’ve grown up a Catholic nationalist so obviously don’t want my kids to go to a Protestant school. Problem is I’m not baptising them either. I’m afraid of how my daughter is going to feel on communion day when all the other girls are wearing their dresses and she isn’t.
The argument that publicly funded schools should be religious because they reflect the religious makeup of the population is a really strange one.
Despite its many flaws the US (which is much, much, much more religious and Christian than Ireland on the whole) aims to keep public schools completely free of religion. Religious education is then the responsibility of the parent outside of school hours with the assistance of their minister/priest/rabbi/imman/druid should they so wish. Now, this doesn’t always work and some public schools in more conservative parts of the US have seen religion creep in but on the whole it’s a decent thing to aim for.
The schooling systems in other European states are more complex with publicly funded religiously controlled schools existing in the UK but not at all in France with other countries like Germany and Italy having mandatory religious instruction in schools although the schools themselves are not controlled by religious denomination s
I think to get a fair idea of how many people identify with a religion, it is important that those who are baptized at birth without their consent and not practice their religion in anyway should tick the box, none.
Think people need to remember that although the anti-religion proponents are vocal there are still a majority of people who consider themselves Catholic in the country.
It’s fair to say that overall people’s relationship is changing with the church and has moved from becoming devout followers to becoming more ‘culturally Catholic’, for example go for christenings, weddings, Christmas & funerals but don’t follow all the teachings.
Even if we look at the abortion referendum I’m sure there was between a quarter and a third of the youngest age groups voted not to change, it’s probably fair to assume a lot (not all by any means) was influenced by religious upbringing.
The argument that states should not fund religious schools is a compelling one but not as simple as it initially seems.
Other countries like England/Australia fund religious schools without any of the issues here, they tend to have a religious ethos but a modern outlook and attract many kids of all faith and none (Catholic and CofE schools in London are immensely popular with Muslim parents for example)
Although if you were designing an education system from scratch it is unlikely religious ones would be funded there are questions over how fair it is to shut down and irrevocably change good successful schools that have been built up over generations.
The change wouldn’t happen overnight, there could be legal battles, funding issues, staff unrest and ultimately the pupils would suffer.
So would it be worth it just to avoid an hour of religion a week that kids can opt out of and usually doesn’t focus on Catholicism anyway?
Where i live there is still a huge issue with sectarianism, even the supposed Non-Dom Schools have links to Churches.
I chose to send my kids to a Catholic School because to be honest although they were baptised, go to mass on Christmas and that’s it, I wasn’t brave enough to send them to what is fundamentally a Protestant School with a recognisably Irish Surname.
Have heard locally of kids who have been bullied for the same reason, and conversely others who haven’t had an issue.
But when it’s my own kids it’s unlikely I would ever take the risk.
The Department of Education pays for the building of schools at great cost and then gives them, free, to the Catholic Church, Church of Ireland, or Educate Together patronage body. They do it every year. I don’t understand why people aren’t more annoyed by it.
If the Catholic Church want to be in the business of running schools, let them build them. State built schools should be state property.
Catholic (or any other) faith formation can take place in schools if that is the wish of the parents of the children attending but whether it’s 74% Catholic, Protestant, or Pastafarian returned on the census, there’s no reason why the Irish state should be continuing to hand multi-million euro building projects over to the Catholic Church to mind for them. We’re a country of grown-ups; we can mind our own things.
Yes, why? Separation of church and state. It’s the 21st century
I guess I am a Roman Catholic, just not a practising one. However, we need to have independent schools. If you want your kids involved in religion, fine, but do it outside of their schooling.
Because the state doesn’t want to take over.
The biggest issue has to be single sex schools. Incredibly damaging to social skills and provide an environment (in boys schools) to grow mysoginistic mindsets and ideologies
they have literally no benefit whatsoever, took me literally a year when I was 15/16 ish to be able to have a proper conversation with a girl my age because of this stupid segregation of sexes.
I’ll be telling Sister Mary Margaret what you said, I will.
Really? Ireland isn’t Catholic anymore? So why then is it that in the last census over 78% of the population identified that way?
I don’t debate the need for reform in education – but the premise for the statement is outright wrong.
Money, Fintan, but you knew that.
A far more useful, and less lazy bit of journalism would be an analysis of what it would cost to make them all secular. Start with putting a price on buying out all the buildings.
This really annoyed me …my cousin who is devout catholic but sent her kids to the nearest school an educate together. So comes to the communion and the church organised religion classes after school. This all makes sense to me but then she tells me the other parents that aren’t religious don’t want to participate in Sunday mass or religion class but they still want their kids to have their communion. That’s the problem with Ireland. Everybody wants their cake and to eat it
It doesn’t matter whether a country is Catholic or not. Schools shouldn’t be.
What’s really annoying is that there are absolutely no non-denominational schools, and the divestment proposal never considered that this was something that was needed, instead focusing on multi-denominational education. The goal should be to remove every single piece of religious dogma from schools: if you want to indoctrinate your kids in your belief system, do so outside school hours.