Madam, – On January 25th, your newspaper ran three items aimed at removing the influence of the Catholic Church from primary school education in Ireland. The banner headline on the Front page, “Catholic Church ‘should give up control of primary schools’,” was followed on page 7 by an article, “74% think church did not react properly to report”. This was capped by the first Editorial on page 15, “The damage to Catholic Church”. This is not disinterested social research, it is a campaign to push the Catholic Church out of education.
As a social scientist, I believe the survey question broke two cardinal rules for designing a fair and unambiguous questionnaire. The first deals with the use of emotive language. The semantic field surrounding the word “control” is extremely negative in our modern world. I believe that even if the respondents were asked, should the Angel Gabriel “control” our schools, the overwhelming response would be No. In the present context, where the Ryan and Murphy reports are being presented, mistakenly, as standing in judgment on the behaviour of every Catholic and particularly priests and religious, is it any wonder that the overwhelming majority would say No?
Secondly, the doubled-barrelled nature of the question makes it impossible to answer the question. Does the question refer to “control” inherent in the role of the patron, the board of management or the executive within the schools? Apart from religious education, none of the churches has any role in devising or supervising the school curriculum.
I believe that if your paper spent more time researching and reporting on what is actually taking place on the ground in Catholic and Church of Ireland primary schools across the country, the reader would get a very different and more positive picture of what is involved in managing a school.
In one of the schools in my home town there are eight people on the board of management. Two are appointed by the patron, two are elected from the parents of children who are presently attending the school, two come from the teaching staff and two are invited on to the board because of particular skills which they possess. All of the above give of their time and expertise without any remuneration. In fact, attending a board of management meeting cost them money. For many of these highly qualified people it is their way of returning something to the society which gave them opportunities in the past.
They have never been pressurised in any way by the patron or any of the clergy. The reason these people want to see a Christian ethos continue in their school is because they value their Christian faith. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Your newspaper is endeavouring to use the justified groundswell of disappointment and revulsion at the mishandling of clerical child abuse on the part of the Catholic Church authorities to generate public pressure on the Catholic Church to abandon primary school management.
However, your campaign fails to take any account that, given the great numbers of children daily in their care, the primary schools of this State, including the 90 per cent (your figures) under Catholic Church management, currently are, and in recent times have been, one of the safest environments for children in the State.
In the town of Fermoy and its area there are six Catholic and one Church of Ireland primary schools. Through my work in these schools, I have been privileged over the past number of years to see the countless hours of voluntary effort put in by boards of management, parents’ committees and other helpers, not to mention the huge amount of unpaid extra-curricular work done by teachers and other staff of the schools in our town. A large proportion of these volunteers, both lay and professional, are committed parishioners. In a very real sense, at the parish level, these volunteers are the Catholic Church in its relationship with the (Catholic) schools.
The wording of the question that was put to voters in the Irish Times/Ipsos, MRBI poll on primary school management (Front page, January 25th), with its operative verb “controls”, may express the concerns of The Irish Times. However, I would suggest that the main concern of the vast majority of the thousands of volunteers sitting on boards of management and assisting them in their daily duty of care and education of children throughout the State is not “control” but rather “service” to local communities, parents and children.
With regard to your own newspaper’s position, I wish that you could be so straightforward as to own that your campaign with regard to the position of the Catholic Church in primary education is motivated, not so much by concerns for the safety of children, as by an ideology that abhors religious faith affiliated education per se. – Yours, etc,