The Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) stance on the composition of school boards of management was vigorously criticised at the Church of Ireland Synod yesterday.
Canon Robert Black, a member of the church's secondary education committee and headmaster of Kilkenny College, told the Synod: "We will not be bullied or bounced by any organisation into accepting a doctrinaire, inflexible and unworkable representative structure for boards of management in our schools, which would not only threaten their very nature but their very survival."
Canon Black said that "all of us associated with secondary education . . . would be far less worried about this issue . . . if the ASTI, in particular, had not made their outrageous threat of industrial action if they don't get what they want out of the forthcoming governance negotiations."
The Church of Ireland education committee accepted and welcomed a meaningful role for teachers and parents in the governance of schools, he said, but in any governance structures the governors or parents' representatives must be in a majority, while the "particular and crucial role of the principal must be maintained".
Canon Black paid tribute to the Minister for Education, Mr Martin, for raising the school block grant to just over £3 million but pointed out that "Protestant parents are the only parents in the State who must pay for the choice to send their children to a secondary school which reflects their tradition and ethos". At £650 per boarder, the nearest equivalent found in the education system was the situation of children from islands who must board on the mainland, he said, and they were given a £1,800 a year grant by the State. "It was on this fact that we constructed a case for more cash," he said.
Canon Mervyn Dickson, of the Down diocese, said there was a strong movement in the North to secularise education and to diminish the role of the churches within the management of schools. Indicative of this was "a growing demand from elected representatives for greater representation on area boards and at local level, based on the belief that only those who are elected are accountable".
There was also the rise of the integrated [schools] movement, which sought to create and manage schools outside the influence and control of the churches, he said. Parents who chose integrated education were "in effect rejecting the handed-down structures of [church]-controlled and -maintained schools". In a passionate speech on the plight of asylum-seekers in Ireland, Canon Des Sinnamon of Taney in Dublin pleaded with the Synod to ask the Government to meet its obligations to those escaping persecution in their own countries, and to "try and make Ireland a place of welcome for them". The situation whereby plainclothes officers or officials stopped strangers at railway stations, ports and airports was, he felt, akin to what had happened under the Nazis.
Archbishop Eames recalled his shock on a recent visit to Magilligan prison when he saw asylum-seekers detained there while their legal situation was investigated. "It is deplorable on moral grounds that such people are being kept alongside convicted prisoners," he said.
