I am a founding parent and teacher in Mol an Óige, a multidenominational primary school in Ennistymon, Co Clare, which aims to deliver the national curriculum using the Steiner model of education to the 49 students presently enrolled.

We parents set up the school and run it ourselves, largely through fundraising and voluntary work, because the Department of Education - despite our following the process and being recommended by the New Schools Advisory Committee (NSAC) - has not given recognition to our application. Could it be the case that the Department of Education has not prepared for the fact that even in rural Ireland children have the right to access diversity and multiculturalism in their education?

I have read the material you provided with your question, including the Dáil replies of the Minister, Mary Hanafin, on February 5th to Trevor Sargent, when she stated that she "was awaiting the report and recommendations of the National School Advisory Committee". Also, her reply to Jan O'Sullivan on April 17th, when she stated that there was "no problem in principle or legally with [vocational education committees] becoming patrons of primary schools".

It is clear that there is no reason under the regulations of the Department of Education to refuse sanction for your school, but I can fully understand why you have not received it. Ireland is changing at a breathtaking pace. Our current primary school system is in the eye of that storm and our civil servants and political representatives are struggling to respond to these changing demands.

The mindset of the Department of Education, under the watchful eye of the Department of Finance, is that the State's role in education is to leave responsibility for the provision and organisation of our primary-school system mainly to the churches, with the State funding a portion of day-to-day running costs, teachers' salaries and a proportion of sanctioned building costs. This arrangement enables the Government to limit the State's expenditure on education to below 5 per cent of GNP.

Some 50 per cent of housing stock has been built in the past 10 years without any requirement on the part of builders to provide the social infrastructure, such as schools, public parks, health clinics, appropriate retail outlets, as is common practice in such housing schemes developed in many first-world economies. Nobody foresaw, least of all our local planners and politicians, that the old parish model was not going to provide the schools to accommodate the children that such large-scale developments were bound to generate.

Furthermore, nobody foresaw that parents such as yourselves, in the heart of rural Ireland, would demand the right to provide a multi- denominational, multicultural education for your children, outside the model of local parish school.

There is a major reluctance on the part of both public servants and politicians to accommodate the changes that your school and its 49 students, sitting in a farmer's field in Ennistymon, and many other such initiatives, demand. We have not as yet addressed the implications of the rapid social changes of the past 15 years or the issue of the educational needs of our immigrant population, who have the same rights to school places for their children as any other child born in Ireland.

To expect the Catholic Church to take on board the State's job to generate and provide patronage for such primary schools is a futile effort to twist the Ireland of the 21st century into that of a previous age, and one that will lead to major social conflict if it is not addressed.

You have a right, as have all parents, to have your children educated according to your wishes, if you meet the requirements as laid down by the Department of Education and Science, which you patently have.