I am rather amazed that I can still be amazed by this country. I tend to believe that my rueful delight in the joys and follies of Ireland has withstood all the craziness that its often bizarre institutions can throw at it. And then along comes a story like the one Lorna Siggins wrote about in this paper last week and a whole new vista of stupidity is opened up. A madness I hadn't known about is revealed, writes Fintan O'Toole.
For those who missed it, here's a summary. A couple in a mixed marriage, John O'Donoghue and Catherine Sides, live in the north Clare village of New Quay. They want their daughter Katie to go to the community school in Gort, about 16 miles away, because it is non-denominational. The Gort school has a place for Katie. There is a school bus service from north Clare that serves it and the bus passes their front door. The Education Acts give parents the right to choose the school they think best for their children, so there's no problem.
Except that there is a nasty little trapdoor hidden in the Department of Education's regulations for the school bus service: "Pupils who would ordinarily qualify for transport to another catchment area may be allowed to board the bus provided that (a) no extra State cost is involved and (b) agreement of the management authorities of the school in their home centre is secured." In effect, since the nearest school in most parts of Ireland is likely to be Catholic, those who control it have a veto on whether pupils in their catchment area can attend another school, a veto they may exercise to keep numbers up and to "protect" the faith.
This is what has happened to Katie. The board of management of a convent school in Kinvara, Seamount College, has objected to Katie being allowed to get the bus to Gort. What's bizarre is not that the school management should have exercised its apparent right to make it practically impossible for kids in their catchment area to get a non-denominational education but that, in a supposed republic, it should have that right in the first place.
The real problem is that no one in political power wants to face the awkward but undeniable reality that thousands of citizens are being denied equal access to an education in line with their own values and that the church-based system we have had since the foundation of the State is utterly unsustainable.
That system is based on several assumptions: that the vast majority of parents want a faith-based education; that the same vast majority is Catholic; and that the waifs and strays who make up the rest of the population can be accommodated by their own schools. Those assumptions have always been highly questionable in principle, but in practice they were, for a long time, relatively unproblematic.
It's news to no one that all of this has changed. Catholics still make up the vast majority of the population, but very many of them now see non-denominational or multi-denominational education, with their emphasis on tolerance and respect for diversity, as more in keeping with their personal morality than a monolithic system could ever be. Meanwhile, religious and spiritual variety has been exploding at a rapid and ever-increasing rate, because of shifts within Irish culture and because of immigration. Between the censuses of 1991 and 2002, the Islamic population has increased by 394 per cent; the Orthodox Christian population by a staggering 2,815 per cent; those belonging to minority religions other than the mainstream Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Orthodox faiths by 102 per cent and those of no religion by 108 per cent.
Leaving aside the questions of principle about whether it's a good thing for a republic to create a plethora of educational ghettos for a multiplicity of groups, such a policy is now quite simply unaffordable. If the non-Catholic population was concentrated in the largest cities, it might be just about possible to give every faith or value system its own schools.
But in fact, there are people who don't fit the current system all over Ireland. Kerry, for example, has more than 10,000 people who belong to non-mainstream churches, who have no religion or who do not wish to be identified with any religious position. Even Leitrim has nearly 1,500 such people. There are 1,434 Buddhists scattered around the west of Ireland. There are almost as many Jehovah's Witnesses in the south-west as there are in Dublin. Eighty-seven people in the midlands defined themselves on their census forms as Pantheists.
Most of the kids in Co Clare, where Katie and her parents live, are Catholic, but the county's population under 24 years old, most of it in primary and secondary schools, also includes 3,640 children and young people in at least nine different religious categories. Is the State really going to pay for the 20 or so new schools at each level that would be needed to cater for these kids in just one county under the current denominational system? Are we going to let the resentments fostered by forcing them all into a system controlled by one church fester until we have religious riots in our towns? Or will someone in power have the courage to start building an education system in which children of all religions and none are treated equally?