Madam, – Consider two families, A and B. Both earn the same income, both have two children of around the same ages and both pay approximately the same amount of income tax.
Family A believes in education and chooses to send its children to a fee-paying school. This costs them €12,000 a year from their disposable income, so they have to keep their old car going, holiday inexpensively at home and make other sacrifices.
Family B sends its children to the local free school. With the €12,000 extra they have to spend, they can replace their car every second year, have an annual foreign holiday (or two) and keep their kids in designer clothes.
James McDermott’s response to this situation (Opinion, April 27th) is to penalise family A by depriving them of their right, as taxpayers, to a State payment towards their children’s education.
– Yours, etc,
Madam, – I welcome James McDermott’s contribution to the perennial debate on the issue of hard-pressed Irish taxpayers subsidising fee-paying educational institutions of privilege, (Opinion, April 27th).
Notwithstanding the meltdown in State finances, whenever the sensitive matter of taxpayer subsidies to private secondary schools surfaces, the formidable middle-class and the well-resourced recipient private schools rush to defend what is increasingly seen as the indefensible.
When free secondary education was introduced in 1967, the decision on whether or not to participate was discretionary. Yet, many of those schools that opted to remain outside the State scheme and retain their lucrative private ethos were rewarded most generously by the Department of Education and receive much the same level of funding as those schools who opted to stay in the free scheme.
Just like fee-paying private hospitals which are profitable businesses, private fee-paying schools must resource themselves financially. Why should taxpayers, the vast majority of whom could never aspire to such a privileged education, be expected to subsidise exclusive boarding schools for privileged minorities when children and teachers in State-run schools are having their funding severely reduced?
– Yours, etc,