Social Democrats’ ‘Genius’ Motion
The Social Democrats are tabling a motion in Dáil Éireann essentially asking for the government to reinstate its position on opening 400 multidenominational schools by 2030 and that all new primary schools will not be under religious patronage.
Either this motion is a work of genius or it’s a conservative rehashing of the government’s previous commitments, which they quietly dropped in the latest government’s programme. My instinct is to believe it is the former.
During the INTO’s Congress, the role of religion in Irish primary schools was one of the main talking points and was mentioned in the General Secretary, John Boyle’s, speech to the Minister for Education, Helen McEntee.
It led McEntee to address the issue of patronage for the first time, where she said:
I think parents should have a choice as to where they send their child [to school], and whether their child will have their Communion, their Confirmation, or anything beyond that. And my objective as Education Minister is to make sure that parents have a choice.
There was nothing controversial, whatsoever, about this statement. It’s the kind of statement that drives me up the wall because I don’t agree that schools should have anything to do with faith formation. However, I am aware that the status quo has, for well over a decade, taken the stance that parental choice (along religious lines) is central to how we divide up our primary schools. Every Minister since the Forum on Pluralism and Patronage has echoed this sentiment.
It was therefore surprising when McEntee received pushback from her own government colleagues, including Barry Ward and Cathal Crowe, who have since claimed otherwise, as well as some unnamed Ministers who claim this is “woke.”
Opening 400 multidenominational schools by 2030 was part of the Programme for Government since 2016, given the Department of Education around 15 years to increase the number of multidenominational primary schools from around 120 schools. I don’t think anyone, except for a government TD would deny that it has been an abject failure.
Despite all sorts of tinkering, including trying to add interdenominational schools into the total number, there are only around 150 multidenominational schools in Ireland, most of which are tiny schools that were going to close and were taken on by the ETB as Community National Schools. In terms of the divestment, depending on who is doing the maths, fewer than 20 schools switched from a denominational ethos to a multidenominational one.
It should also be said that the target of 400 schools wasn’t exactly ambitious. Even if the target was reached, it would have meant that Catholic schools would drop from an almost monopoly of 89% to 83%, hardly revolutionary, and certainly not much solace to families that don’t wish for their children to have to face the daily reality of legal discrimination.
Given there was no way, at the rate they were going, it was no surprise to me that the latest Programme for Government made no reference to the target of 400 schools.
This, in my view, is what makes the Social Democrats’ motion so clever.
They are proposing that the government simply reinstate their commitment to a very small number of multidenominational schools, hardly a drop in the ocean. The genius lies in that it puts it up to the government to do one of two things:
- Support the motion and spend the very small amount of time left flogging the dead horse that is the reconfiguration/divestment model
- Oppose the motion and effectively put on record that they don’t believe in choice for parents.
If the government can’t commit to 15% of schools not being under religious control, it’s embarrassing for a country that describes itself as a secular republic. Even many Catholic Church leaders are talking about divesting 80% of their schools to multidenominational providers. What a shambles!
If the government support the motion, and they continue with the divestment/reconfiguration model, it will be doomed to failure. When the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism was founded in 2011, I doubt it anticipated that there would be so much opposition from communities in changing from religious to multidenominational patronage.
In their excellent book, The Politics of Irish Primary Education, Reform in an Era of Secularisation, by Sean McGraw and Jonathan Tiernan, the authors discuss why this is the case. All the data and all the surveys suggest that parents want more multidenominational schools but when it turned out to be their child’s school, this was not the case. They called it out as NIMBYism.
There is nothing logical about NIMBYism and the only conclusion one can draw from it, is that it’s a dead duck of an idea. Even the most liberal areas of Ireland where parents overwhelmingly voted against the Catholic Church’s stance on marriage equality and abortion rights, overwhelmingly were opposed to losing a Catholic Church stance on their child’s education, which ironically included not discussing LGBTQ+ relationships or many women’s rights.
If the government do support the Social Democrats’ motion, they are going to have to think of another way to reach their target of 400 schools. With the time ticking, they are going to have to come up with a new plan if they realistically want to reach it.
The maddening thing is that the first part of the solution is very simple. It’s so simple it could happen tomorrow. In fact, it’s so simple it’s been happening in many schools for decades.
Move faith formation outside the normal school day.
It’s genuinely as simple as that. (Did I use the word simple enough times?)
While it doesn’t solve everything, it would be a very easy first step to ensuring that no child in the country would be discriminated against on religious grounds. Those that want faith formation would receive it, and from a teacher who believes what they are teaching; and those that don’t want faith formation can go to school for the full day without being excluded.
The Social Democrats have cleverly reopened the conversation on patronage without going any further than any government party has ever gone. They could have put forward a much stronger motion but this move holds a mirror to the government and asks them to reflect on their failures. This could prove to be Minister McEntee’s first real challenge since taking on her role and I’ll be interested to see if she can clear this baptismal barrier.
