Madam, – The formidable Protestant middle-class subsidy machine is moving into action again (Revd Gordon Linney, Opinion, October 5th) to protect what it sees as its interests.
Much is made of the 1967 settlement, as if it should remain sacrosanct, and as if all Protestants were educated in Protestant schools at that time (they were not). The debate is still couched in terms which assumes a denominational rigidity which probably never existed. We should note that 2009 is as remote from 1967 as that latter date was from 1925, when WB Yeats made his infamous speech about Protestants being “no petty people”, and the new State was concerned to hang on to its Protestant population because of the wealth and capital that might take flight.
Times change. To justify a taxpayer subsidy to what, by any criteria, is a relatively privileged community to start with, requires a rigorous analysis of the whole concept of “Protestant” education and, in particular, precisely what now is this “Protestant ethos” which the schools are said to inculcate and defend.
Ethos can be defined as the disposition, character or fundamental values peculiar to a specific people. So how do Protestant schools measure up to this, and how is the ethos of such a school framed? One criterion, on which schools would score highly, is by their formal system of governance. Most governing bodies are overwhelmingly Protestant – though in true Protestant fashion, the clerics are kept firmly in the minority. But if ethos means anything, it must surely reflect the ethical make-up of those who actually attend and work in the school. Here the position is probably a great deal murkier than it would have been in 1967.
Are Protestant staff and pupils now in a minority in some “Protestant” schools? Already by 1978, 19 per cent of Protestant secondary school places were filled by Catholics. That rose to 34 per cent in the comprehensives (Kurt Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic State, 1983). I would imagine that the tipping point into majority Catholic participation has been achieved in several schools since.
An analysis of the “Protestantness” of Protestant schools cannot ignore this elephant in the room. It would be interesting to have these figures for each school: an intelligent guess would be that the Dublin-area schools might show a rather different profile than those elsewhere in the country. Even aggregate figures would tell us something. So, could we have them, please? Then perhaps we can have an informed debate.
Fee-paying schools are businesses, despite some peddling the notion that they somehow represent a way of life. It is rather ironic that Protestant fee-paying schools thrived in the Celtic Tiger era precisely because they were seen by many upwardly-mobile prosperous Catholics as socially desirable. The very ethos which they purport to maintain has been undermined, I suspect, by the necessity to attract and retain those customers and to reap the benefits of economies of scale. Some schools have also marketed themselves towards other parts of the world as a sort of less-expensive English public school. It is rather difficult to see how this, precisely, justifies an expensive subsidy from Irish taxpayers.
Revd Gordon Linney, for whom I have a lot of time, does as good a job as he can in defending what is close to the indefensible. But he rather lets the cat out of the bag by referring, in passing, to the five Protestant comprehensives. There is a mechanism for Protestant participation, with safeguards, in the free education system without the general taxpayer having to subsidise selective and elitist schools. – Yours, etc,