Sir, – Seamus Mulconry does his duty well as general secretary of the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association (Letters, January 14th) by defending a suggestion made by the Catholic bishops that schools in a parish be allowed use the Catholic barrier to admissions in the case of oversubscription, if one school in the parish has been “handed over” to the State.
What he is side-stepping is the fact that a parish is a section of a church district under the care of a priest, and as such it should be responsible for its own parishioners. For many of us opposed to filtering school applications on the basis of religion, no school has the right to exclude a child on the grounds of their faith. Whether there is oversubscription or not is not the issue. Church and State must be separate so that schools cannot screen pupils on religious grounds nor is it the duty of a State-funded school to indoctrinate children in any one particular faith. It is time to let parishes be responsible for the faith formation of their parishioners and not the schools. – Yours, etc,
SHEILA MAHER,
Dublin 14.