A universal model of non-denominational education is needed instead of reforms to the patronage system currently in operation
INCREASING ATTENTION has recently focused on the rather limited protection for religious freedom in Irish schools. This has centred on the continuing predominance of the denominational schools on which the State historically relied in order to give effect to its constitutional obligation to provide free primary education.
Despite recent efforts by the private group Educate Together, and the piloting of a new model of community national school, the concrete effect of the patronage model is that families in many areas of the State have little choice but to avail of denominational primary schools which are committed to beliefs contrary to their own.
Effectively, this may set, as the price of access to free primary education, the surrender of another constitutional right, parents’ and children’s freedom of conscience and religion.
There is near-universal acceptance of the need for reform, including on the part of the Catholic Church, which has indicated a willingness to divest itself of patronage in at least a portion of the Republic’s primary schools.
The appetite for change is reflected in the recent announcement of a forum on patronage and pluralism in primary education.
Unfortunately, however, this debate has not expressed widespread acceptance of the primacy of religious freedom as a cardinal determinant of reform, against which all other competing social interests must yield.
The recent discourse has instead centred on the rather conservative notion that the ethos of the schools the State supports must simply be adjusted so as to reflect social and demographic change – to cater to a more “diverse” Ireland – as if there were ever a notional past era in which the perfect homogeneity of the citizens’ beliefs made it acceptable to devolve the public education to a near-monopoly of religious provision. The imperative of religious freedom must transcend the arrival of “diversity” as an imagined historical novelty.
Thus, “choice” and “diversity” have become the new, secularised leitmotifs for legitimising the “patronage” model. The emergence of choice as a consensual point of reference has not translated as an acceptance that all citizens should enjoy access to a common, non-sectarian public school in which all beliefs and none might co-exist on terms of equality.
Instead, it expresses the desire that the “ethos-mix” of schools should better reflect demographic change. It simply means that schools’ ethos should be more accurately grafted on to the prevailing preference of local communities, however these may be determined. This reduces freedom of choice to a crude plebiscitary notion, which retains the essentials of the patronage model.
It fails to take seriously the idea of religious freedom as an individual and universal right, as opposed to a communitarian claim for recognition of identity.
If religious freedom is made dependent on schools’ ethos being attuned to citizens’ specific beliefs and identities, its guarantee then depends, in part, on the hazards of chance – in particular, on critical mass in a particular locality.
Failing this, all the Constitution appears to guarantee is the right to withdraw from timetabled religious classes within schools that nonetheless remain free to integrate their ethos within the whole school day. This model makes the full measure of religious freedom dependent on the vagaries of school recognition process, and in turn, on a range of morally arbitrary social and demographic contingencies.
Generally, suggestions of reform have been limited to readjustments within the logic and form of the patronage model, better tapering the ethos-mix, while stopping short of prescribing a universal model of non-denominational education, which might put religious freedom beyond the crude vagaries of the school recognition process.
The Irish Human Rights Commission launched a report this week with recommendations including: “The State should ensure that there is a diversity of provision of school type within educational catchment areas throughout the State which reflects the diversity of convictions now represented in the State.”
I acknowledge the limited statutory remit of the commission. However, its report falls short of suggesting the creation of a universal, common public school. It essentially suggests reforms within the logic and form of the patronage model.
On the other hand, Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn’s desire to see the church divest control of up to a half of primary schools to the State is radical and welcome.
Eoin Daly is a lecturer in law at Dublin City University