Three weeks ago, at the opening of the academic year at the School of Education Studies in Dublin City University, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, delivered a very interesting and thoughtful address on the subject of Changing Society, Changing Schools.
At the outset, he said that he always attributes our remarkable economic progress "in the first place to our educational system" and, within that system, to "the quality of our teachers . . . awakening a passion for learning, a healthy curiosity, a respect for difference and diversity, and a commitment to good citizenship . . . (which) can only happen when the school is linked to the realities of the broader context of a community".
All this I would endorse. Arising from the last point, yesterday in Killarney I addressed the Association of Principals and Deputy Principals [ of second-level] schools) on the related question of the role principals and teachers might play in helping to develop a badly-needed civic morality in Ireland where traditional moral teaching based on religious authority has lost much of its force.
In my remarks on that subject I raised the controversial question of whether, in undertaking such a task, engaging with what is now a very heterogeneous group of young people, many of them alienated from institutional religion, teachers generally - as distinct from teachers of religion - might need to base their approach on broad ethical principles rather than on the specifics of a particular faith.
In his address three weeks ago the archbishop went on to say that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has raised the issue of demographic change in Ireland, where the ethos of most schools is Catholic but many immigrants are not. He added that there are now schools in Dublin where more than 50 per cent of the students are international children rather than Irish - with 80 per cent of new entrants in one school this year falling into the international category - many of these not being Catholic.
(In this column on November 25th last year I urged that the Department of Education should take steps to ensure that this percentage remains at or below 30 per cent, so as to help the students from abroad to integrate into our society, while also ensuring the maintenance of standards both for those children and for Irish children in these schools.)
The archbishop went on to point out that on several occasions he had endorsed the concept of a plurality of educational patronage as desirable and welcome in Ireland because it could bring benefits to all - and, he added, it could also allow specifically Catholic schools to be more distinctively Catholic.
I have in recent times raised aspects of this issue of confessional education informally with several members of the Catholic hierarchy, not all of whom may be as open to new ideas on this matter as is the Archbishop of Dublin.
Diarmuid Martin contests the view that religious education is ideological and divisive, and "perhaps not really a good thing for young people". He says that religious education "must always open children's minds . . . stimulating creativity and innovation . . . and fostering a climate of knowledge about various religions, and dialogue and mutual respect among different religious traditions".
Nevertheless, most significantly, having rightly paid tribute to the generous and sensitive way in which Catholic schools have handled the current influx of children of different nationalities and religions, the archbishop went on to envisage for the future a new plurality of patronage that would include, for the first time, the State itself managing primary schools under what he described as "strong community ownership".
In such new State schools there should, he suggested, be "an element of instruction on the variety of religious traditions present in the community", but these schools should also permit education in their own religion for the children of parents who sought that facility. This, he says, is "the model that is present in numerous countries in continental Europe, and has shown its worth".
In the context of more than 150 years of confessional national education in Ireland, this is a revolutionary proposal, the formulation of which was a most courageous move, even (or perhaps particularly) for an archbishop.
His new thinking on this issue clearly deserves to be disseminated more widely than has hitherto been the case, and to be made the subject of debate - which is why I am writing about it here today.
The archbishop's proposal does not, of course, address all the issues that are starting to arise in this area.
As I mentioned in this column last November, the growing demand for non-denominational or multi-denominational education is currently concentrated in the expanding suburbs of cities, or in major towns in 10 of our counties, where - against the general trend in our State - the number of children has recently been rising by 5 per cent to 7 per cent a year. In these areas the demand for such schools can conveniently be met by simply providing that the new schools required by such a local expansion of the child population take this particular form.
But when, as is inevitable, this new demand spreads to other less urbanised areas, where the number of children is declining, it clearly could not be met by building more schools for fewer children. This situation will in time pose a very difficult church/State problem - unless the Catholic Church in such areas becomes willing to review the existing clerical patronage arrangement.