Our household is one of many across the country applying to primary schools for our child who starts junior infants next September. It is both an easy choice – primary schools in this country are very good – and a tricky one. The practical considerations are many: location, after-school care, the principal, outdoor space, accessibility, support services and whether it is co-ed. When these can have a real impact on family life, questions of religious ethos start to feel like a matter of principle.
But we’re making these applications in the context of this month’s report on sexual abuse of children at religious schools. That report is a reminder that there was a systemic culture of abuse across hundreds of religious run schools over a prolonged period, and that it was committed by members of religious orders, under the oversight of the institution of the Catholic Church. The figures are worth repeating, though they are probably a vast underestimation; 2,395 allegations of sexual abuse made against 884 individuals in 308 schools spanning a 30-year period.
It has felt like my motherhood has been unfolding as the ghosts of the harms wrought by religious institutions are laid bare in black and white in Government documents. The same child who starts school next year was in her first weeks of life when the mother and baby home commission report came out.
It was January 2021, and we were deep in lockdown. From the isolation of our couch I fumbled with nurturing and caring for this tiny creature as I listened to heartbreaking story after story of neglect, abuse, misogyny and death. Some numbers are again worth repeating: 9,000 babies died in awful conditions, many not afforded even the dignity of a decent burial. Untold numbers were sent abroad, though many probably had people who loved them here. Seven drug trials were carried out on tiny bodies, without their or their parents’ consent.
The Catholic Church has covered up abuse in every part of Irish life that it has been given control over. It is an institution that has repeatedly put the protection of its own power and reputation above the welfare of people in its care. And it remains immune from any form of democratic oversight.
It is also an institution that still oversees the vast majority of primary schools in this country. Currently 89 per cent of Ireland’s 3,116 primaries are under the patronage of the church. The church has a say on the board of management in these schools, and on things such as principal selection. Fewer than 160 are multi-denominational, and just 32 are community national schools, the new model for a State-run, coeducational and multidenominational primaries.
For someone who was in the school system when the church scandals started to come out in the 1990s, the pace of secularisation of our public education system has been strikingly slow. And without a radical change in ambition, secularisation will not be achieved any time soon. The Government goal is for there to be 400 multidenominational schools by 2030, which would amount to about 13 per cent.
A few years into this strategy, which allows schools to put in place processes to remove themselves from church patronage, there are a handful of cases where this has happened. But this scale of ambition is depressingly modest, especially when compared with other areas where this Government has set the bar high. We have a target of 80 per cent renewable electricity by 2030. The Road Safety Authority has set a goal of zero road deaths. Whether we reach these targets remains to be seen, but goals tell a story and push us to think of systemic solutions.
In contrast, by 2030, we want 80 per cent of primary schools to remain under the patronage of the church. This is treated as a local problem, a matter of choice, rather than as a State-level responsibility to secularise the public education system.
But the incentives aren’t there for parents to take on changing an entire system. If you are lucky enough to have a choice of schools, as we do in our part of Dublin, there are so many things that go into making that choice. You are thinking about the lovely people who answer your questions on the phone, the drop-off times, the cost of uniforms. Religious ethos is not correlated with many of the quality or practical factors, making patronage feel like a matter of principle that you may not be able to afford. At the level of the school, you are asking parents and boards of management to take on not just an institutional entwinement of church and State that has persisted for more than a century; but also to confront both inertia and possibly a local well-known face, a person who may be widely liked, and may have contributed to the school.
We need to stop asking parents to rock 3,000 local boats. If we are serious about having separation of church and State, it is time to look at the secularisation of our schools as one of structural change, not individual choice. A good place to start will be aligning our targets and strategy with this reality.
Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at TheBriefing.ie
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