Madam, – As a former classmate of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin in the De La Salle Primary Schools in Ballyfermot, I am more than disappointed at his defence of the fee-paying school ethos. As someone who must be aware of the criminal waste of potential in the State education sector due to the failures of successive governments, how on earth can he approve of diverting scarce tax resources to establishments which practise a form of apartheid based not on racism but on affluence?
I reject the usual defence offered – that many families make the sacrifices necessary to send their children to the elite schools at the expense of some of life’s other precious things. They do it because they know that the cachet of being a past pupil of a fee-paying school will open doors that are closed to children from the state sector.
When the archbishop and I were in school, we were taught that Christ loved the poor, that it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. I wonder if he still believes that. If he does, he should use his influence to divert the reported millions to where they are really needed – in the state school system where he got the basic education that led to his current position. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – In reporting the opening of Catholic Schools Week (“Moves by private schools to go free denied”, January 27th), Alison Healy and Sean Flynn unthinkingly and inaccurately repeat the simplistic classification of the minority religion, voluntary sector, post-primary schools as “fee-paying second-level schools”. This was purveyed also on the front page of The Irish Times on January 20th (“Fee-paying schools got €100m subsidy from State last year”).
At a meeting with the Minister for Education and Science in November 2008 to discuss the targeting of these schools for specific cutbacks in the recent budget, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin and the bishops of Meath and Cork received a specific assurance that these schools were understood to be in a “unique category of their own”. This is in line with the utterances and practice of successive Ministers for Education since the introduction of free secondary education in 1967. At that time, and ever since, Protestant voluntary schools have been treated and designated by successive Ministers for Education as being within “the free scheme” as block grant schools.
While the Protestant voluntary secondary schools do charge fees of necessity, predominantly as boarding schools, your readers deserve a less simplistic perspective than that portrayed in The Irish Times two weeks in a row.
The majority of Protestant voluntary sector Schools, within a national system of post-primary education which continues to be predominantly denominational in character, cater regionally for the educational needs of a dispersed Protestant community who choose a Protestant education for their children where the State makes no free second-level education available to them.
In vast tracts of the Republic of Ireland – the west of Ireland, the south-west, north and east Cork, the south-east, west Dublin, the midlands, north-east and much of the north-west – the State is not, itself, providing free Protestant secondary schools.
The State’s support, therefore, through the block grant scheme administered by the Secondary Education Committee for the education of necessitous Protestants, goes some way towards filling a gap created by the State’s own inability to provide free schools in every place.
It is also true to say that, in most parts of the State, Protestants who do not meet the rigorous means-tested criteria enjoined on the Secondary Education Committee, but who want their child to attend a Protestant school, have no option but to pay for that which, in contrast, the majority of Irish secondary-school pupils are not obliged to pay for: second level education in a school of their own religious characteristic spirit and ethos. – Yours, etc,