A discriminatory law has stopped most schools from discriminating
I’m not the CEO or head honcho of any organisation. As lovely as blogging on Medium is, it doesn’t beat the impact of getting published in a national newspaper.
Alan Hynes is the CEO of the Catholic Schools’ Partnership, one of the many organisations in Ireland that promote Catholic evangelism in Irish primary schools. They are most known for running Catholic Schools Week, which I always find amusing because in 90% of Irish primary schools, it is always Catholic Schools Week.
Alan gets to write an op-ed piece in the Irish Times every so often and today’s piece was all about discrimination.
Alan argues that the lifting of the baptism barrier was discriminatory against Catholic schools and it is because of this that the divestment/reconfugration programme has been so slow. He reasons it’s because Catholic families are scared that they will have no place to send their children because Catholic schools won’t be able to prioritise Catholic schools. He quotes all sorts of human rights without referring to the one that his schools are encouraged to ignore every single day; that is to be transparent about opting out procedures. I always say these people are excellent at sinning by omission!
He calls the Admission Bill discriminatory against Catholic schools, the argument being that Catholic schools were the only religious patron body that are not allowed to discriminate enrollments on religious grounds. All other religious bodies can. I actually agree with him on this point.
I was also against the exception made that prevented Catholic schools discriminating against non Catholics on enrolment, but it was for different reasons to Alan.
However, there’s a huge leap in the argument that schools aren’t reconfiguring because of the baptism barrier. It’s a gishgallop at best.
When the baptism barrier was being discussed in the media around 2016 when Nikki Murphy couldn’t get a place for her son in a single school in Dublin 6 because she hadn’t baptised her child, the Catholic authorities were highly dismissive of a problem. They argued that there was almost no problem at all and I remember the CPSMA tottering out figures that it only affected a tiny number of families. In fact, they argued at the time, there was no need to lift a so-called baptism barrier because as ar as they were concerned, all children were welcome in their schools.
Well, it seems it was a problem after all and now they want it back. I’m always told the Catholic Church is a complicated and broad entity. You’d need a huge amount of faith to try and figure out what they’re doing.
