Madam, - We welcome the prescience and timing of your Editorial of January 30th, "Integrated schools offer way forward". Last week the integrated education movement in Northern Ireland announced that three schools, Tyrella Primary School (Co Down), Crumlin High School and Ballycastle Primary School (both Co Antrim), have all recently conducted successful parental ballots to transform to integrated status.
The additional three schools will bring the total number of integrated schools in Northern Ireland to 61 and boost the integrated school population to around 18,300 pupils.
This is an exciting time for these three schools and further evidence of the growing demand from parents throughout Northern Ireland to educate children together and build a shared future.
Moreover, this news also comes at a time when the results of a future three development proposals for new integrated schools - in Clogher Valley, Moira/Hillsborough and Rowallane (Mid-Down) - are waiting for Ministerial approval.
The British Government has so far failed to live up to the more recent promises of "A Shared Future" (March 2005), where it stated that "separate but equal is not an option. Parallel living and the provision of parallel services are unsustainable both morally and economically".
Under this framework, the Department of Education in Northern Ireland is required to promote sharing in all levels of education within an overall context of the government's obligation to "facilitate the development of a shared community where people wish to learn, live, work and play together."
In particular, "A Shared Future" encouraged "developing opportunities for shared and inter-cultural education at all levels - nursery, primary, secondary and tertiary, providing further, higher and adult education on an open and integrated basis".
It also recognised that "the education system. . . represents a major opportunity to create greater sharing and address the diseconomies of duplication". We await the ministerial decisions with interest. - Yours, etc,
Dr PHILIP O'SULLIVAN, Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education, University Road, Belfast 7.
Madam, - I am opposed to Catholic parents sending their children to integrated schools, which have not the ethos, atmosphere, images of piety, regular prayer before and after class and faith instruction required by the promises of baptism.
When parents come for the sacrament of baptism the priest asked them if they understand what they are undertaking. "Are you accepting the responsibility of training him/her in the practice of the Faith. It will be your duty to bring him/her up to keep God's commandments as Christ taught us by loving God and our neighbour".
The parents reply, "We do". That solemn promise must be kept and without going to Catholic schools it cannot be kept.
It has been British government policy since the 1960s to solve Northern Ireland's problems by imposing integrated comprehensive education. Mr Blair always visits an integrated school when he comes to Northern Ireland, but he sends his own children to a Catholic school in London.
The present British government is abolishing grammar schools, closing secondary schools and imposing comprehensive schools at secondary level. Later and quickly they will deal with primary schools, contrary to the wishes of parents.
They may pass First Communion and Confirmation preparation back to parents, which is unfair in any Catholic parish where the teachers do an essential task and do it very well. The parents would be incapable of doing it. The coaching instruction and example of the teachers is absolutely necessary.
East Germany should be a lesson to us. German Benedictine monks, whose school was linked to St Patrick's Academy, Dungannon, went on mission into Germany after the wall came down in 1989. They found that 40 years had destroyed religion, Protestant and Catholic. People knew nothing of God and Christ nor of the Bible.
The full Catholic training from baptism to marriage or ordination is essential for the children of our country to practice their faith in a Europe of relative paganism.
We must be faithful to the traditions of Columba and Columbanus and convert Europe for the third time. - Yours, etc,
Mgr DENIS FAUL PP, Carrickmore, Co Tyrone.