Sir, – In his article (Opinion, December 11th), Paddy Monahan implies that the removal of religious education from taxpayer-funded schools is a logical, practical application of the Constitution’s provisions in this area.
It is nothing of the kind. The Constitution does not at all envisage the kind of secular education that Mr Monahan espouses.
The three most relevant passages of the Constitution, taken together, state that:
Legislation providing State aid for schools shall not . . . be such as to affect prejudicially the right of any child to attend a school receiving public money without attending religious instruction at that school. (Art. 44.2.4) . . . [It is] the right and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children, (Art.42.1). Parents shall be free to provide this education in their homes or in private schools or in schools recognised or established by the State. (Art. 42.2).
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In other words, while the Constitution does not support the compulsory instruction of children in a religion which is not theirs, it does not envisage, or provide for, the situation in which the parents do not intend to provide any religious education to their children. And the general presumption of Art.42 is that children receive their education in school.
Mr Monahan is entitled to assert that all education should be in a secular setting, but he is not correct in implying that this position has the support of the Constitution. Mr Monahan’s omission of the phrase “at that school”, in Art. 44, is a serious misrepresentation of the constitutional position. – Yours, etc,
BILL TONER, SJ,
Dublin 10.
Sir, – In my article (Opinion, December 11th) I stated “it is the norm throughout Ireland for children not of the Catholic faith to be singled out every day in the classroom from four years of age to sit alone at the back of the class while their peers receive faith-formation”. Fr Chris Hayden (Letters, December 13th) took issue with this, writing that he has been involved in the management of Catholic schools and that the treatment of non-Catholic children that I outlined is “very far from the norm”. He suggests I should be “more factual” in my assertions.
I absolutely stand over what I wrote. Around 90 per cent of our taxpayer-funded primary schools are controlled by the Catholic Church. The daily segregation and discrimination faced by non-Catholic children from age four is a national disgrace and it is to the eternal shame of the Minister for Education, Joe McHugh, that he essentially refuses to discuss the matter, ceding responsibility to the church.
Fr Hayden is the first representative of a Catholic school that I have come across in my experience as policy officer at Education Equality to suggest the practice of classroom segregation is not a reality – though many have tried to justify it. There are about 3,000 Catholic primary schools in the country. If Fr Hayden knows of one or two that do not discriminate against children on the basis of religion that is a good thing.Perhaps those schools could be a model for the changes we need to see across the education system.
Can Fr Hayden, or any representative of a Catholic school that purports not to discriminate against children and segregate on the basis of religion, tell us how they deal with faith formation and religious indoctrination in their schools while upholding the constitutional right of those children and families who wish to opt out? Have they taken the obvious step and moved faith formation outside the school day so that families can instead opt-in, should they choose to?
This would indeed be laudable and is what we at Education Equality request of the Minister for Education for the entire education system. – Yours, etc,
PADDY MONAHAN,
Raheny,
Dublin 5.