A brave experiment started the day that Ireland's first inter-denominational Gaelscoil opened in Wicklow town. The year was 1996, the spirit of ecumenism was growing and a political solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland looked possible for the first time. But the optimism felt in different sectors on the island was tested severely, writes Medb Ruane
Six years later, events at Gaelscoil Thulach na nÓg in Dunboyne, Co Meath, are starting to show just how difficult educating Protestant and Catholic children together may now be. On the surface, the row about whether Roman Catholic Communion classes should take place within school hours or afterwards seems like a clear-cut case of latent prejudices begging to be examined. Deeper down, the ecumenical project itself is at stake.
Most of the parents, all the teachers and the school principal want the Communion classes held after school so that Protestant children won't have to be segregated or sit twiddling their thumbs while Catholic friends learn how Christ's body and blood are a real presence, not a symbolic one. The board of management begs to differ and Tomás Ó Dulaing, the principal, faces the possibility of disciplinary action for trying to keep his pupils together within school hours.
There would be no such problem if the school were in the multi-denominational mainstream. The norm there is for Communion classes after hours, which in my children's school seems to give the Catholic children a greater sense of purpose and encourages the others to be genuinely curious about what their friends are doing and why.
But this school is specifically inter-denominational, built on an ethos established back in the 1990s when stressing what Christians had in common was more important than insisting on what kept them apart. The creative linkage between the Irish language and Christian ecumenism resonated with sounds and signs of the Celtic church, too, and the dreams of recreating it cherished by pioneers such as Douglas Hyde, a Protestant, let it be remembered.
Although the conflict of rights at Gaelscoil Thulach appears at first glance as yet another example of the Catholic majority allowing minorities to include themselves in on the majority's terms, it may not be so simple.
ONLY six interdenominational Gaelscoileanna exist so far and all come under the terms set by An Foras Patrúnachta, the patron body set up in 1993 so that the Irish-speaking schools - 38 at present - could be recognised by the Department of Education. The ethos set then still governs the patron's requirement that religious education at the interdenominational schools happen within school hours.
It is tempting to add the stereotypes of gaelgeoir with Catholic and decide it is all a matter of four green fields gone wrong again. But the conflict of rights at Gaelscoil Thulach hits at some of ecumenism's core problems now. Few of the patron's founding members could have foreseen the shift in ecumenical relations in less than a decade.
Like others in the early 1990s, they may have imagined that by 2002, relations between the Christian churches in Ireland would be rather different than they turned out to be and that any conflicting rights could be resolved without struggle.
Back then, Archbishop Connell had not called President Mary McAleese's taking Communion in the Church of Ireland "a sham", the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was less influential, and the Catholic Bishops of Ireland and Britain had no notion of getting together to publish documents that stressed the theological distinctions - read otherwise as "superiority" - of Roman Catholic Communion. Ecumenically, it was a different world.
The difficulties at Gaelscoil Thulach are a sign of how ordinary people are being expected to deal with the fall-out of changed ecumenical relations on the hoof and then have their considered views ignored. The main churches involved have not yet responded to exploratory probes by An Foras Patrunachta for feedback on what they imagined religious rights might be. Faced with so many theological, political and sectarian potholes, the patron is taking refuge in bureaucracy because changing the ethos means changing the terms of their agreement with the Minister for Education, while the Minister is keeping an extremely low profile, probably in the hope that it will all go away.
RELIGIOUS rights are perceived to be more complex now than they were 10 years ago, as the need to assert difference has involved generating issues on which to be different. Must that invalidate the adventure on which schools such as Gaelscoil Thulach have embarked?
Why, now, should young children be exposed to complex inter-church differences involving huge theological issues like transubstantiation? The possibilities multiply. If women can be priests in the Church of Ireland, why not in the Roman Catholic Church? If Catholic priests used to be allowed to marry, why were they stopped? It could get worse.
If some bright spark decides to ask about Mary, the mother of Jesus, how does the teacher explain virginity to seven-year-olds and then discuss why some Christians must believe Mary was a virgin while for others it isn't relevant? The complexities of dogma could become academic when faced with persistent questioning by a typical seven-year-old and the issue of Christian identity far simpler.