State ready to sanction echos of sectarian education

LAST September, four primary school teachers in Dublin sent a letter to the editor of The Irish Times expressing their alarm at recent developments in the field of education. The letter could not be published because the four teachers were afraid to have their names stated in print, and the paper, for good reasons, has a policy of not publishing anonymous letters. This is a reality of life in the liberal, pluralist Republic of 1996 respectable people afraid matter debate. And it a reality that, far from challenged by the Government, is about to given the full sanction of the law.

It would be nice to think that the four who were scared of putting their names to letter were merely the victims of a persecution complex. But they were, in fact, perfectly right to worry. Since the infamous case of Eileen Flynn, sacked from her teaching job in a Catholic school for having "a lifestyle not in keeping with the Catholic ethos", it is perfectly legal to sack competent teachers because of what they do or say outside school. What the four teachers wanted say was that sectarian schooling was a bad idea. They were, in other words, attacking the ethos of the schools they work for. If they were sacked for doing so, neither the Government that pays their wages nor the courts that are supposed to uphold their rights could do anything about it.

It is one of the more grotesque ironies of Irish politics that the current Government, the most left wing in Irish history, may also go down as the one that did most to set sectarian education in concrete. The concrete is being mixed right now. The gravel is Niamh Bhreathnach's apparent willingness to copper fasten church control of schools in forthcoming legislation. The sand is Mervyn Taylor's extraordinary proposal to exclude religious schools and hospitals from the scope of the Employment Equality Act. And the cement is the continuing failure of the State to support the development of multi denominational schools.

Nobody believes that it is easy to sort out the relationship between a modern democracy on the one hand and a church based education system on the other. Nobody wants to get the churches out of education or to deny parents the right to have their children educated in a way that does no violence to their own values. And everybody accepts that the State has to perform a difficult balancing act between parental choice on the one hand and the danger of a hopelessly fragmented and disastrously expensive system on the other.

Yet a decent balance is not impossible. In spite of the consistently reactionary attitude of the Catholic Hierarchy, the Conference of Religious in Ireland, whose members actually run the Catholic secondary schools, has been open minded and thoughtful in its contributions to the debate on issues like ethos and control. There is a real constituency for democratic change in the National Parents Councils, the rank and file of the teacher unions and the wide range of civic organisations who contributed to the National Education Convention. With strong, clear leadership from the Government, the move towards a democratic and pluralistic education system could have a formidable consensus behind it.

That kind of leadership, though, has been almost entirely absent. Instead, there is every sign of a complete capitulation to vested church interests determined to maintain their power. We are told that legislation will underpin current levels of church control of schools. We have had proposals from Niamh Bhreathnach to give the churches effective control over the promotion of teachers within schools. And we are confronted, in section 37 of the Employment Equality Bill, with a specific statement that it is lawful for church schools to discriminate against teachers and other employees on the grounds of religion.

MERVYN Taylor is proposing, in other words, to copperfasten and perpetuate the results of the Eileen Flynn case, and to make it virtually impossible for teachers' who do not practice a religion in strict accordance with the demands of a church. Hierarchy to pursue their profession without the threat of punishment or dismissal. These threats apply to a large majority of teachers at both primary and secondary level.

According to a recent extensive survey of its membership by the INTO, 56 per cent want either a multi denominational or a non denominational ethos for their schools, and therefore hold attitudes at variance with the current ethos. Ten per cent - 2,000 teachers - don't want to teach religion, and are therefore in a situation where they can either teach hypocrisy to the children of the nation or risk dismissal. And it is patently obvious that a large majority of teachers in Catholic schools are defying church teaching on the use of artificial contraceptives - if they were not, the entire system would collapse because of the numbers on maternity leave.

There would be some logic in the willingness of Niamh Bhreathnach and Mervyn Taylor to kowtow before the church Hierarchies if they were also willing to provide a real alternative to sectarian education. There is a case for the State saying that any significant group of parents - Catholics, Muslims, Protestants, Gaelgoirs, Tridentines, atheists, Esperanto speakers, and so on - can establish a school and run it along whatever lines it chooses, with the State providing basic funding for teachers' salaries and buildings. And if that is to be the policy, there is also a case for saying that such schools must be free to sack teachers who are not Catholic/Muslim/Gaelgoir enough.

But the corollary in that case has to be that every group has the same rights. What we are getting at the moment is all the disadvantages of such a system without the compensating corollary of equality of treatment. For while the rights of the churches are being underpinned, those of other groups are being ignored.

The appalling plight of the Crumlin Multi Denominational School, which seems set to become the first victim of a school eviction in the history of the State, is a stark example. At the moment, this school, established by parents on precisely the kind of democratic, inclusive principles that we in the Republic like to urge on our friends in the North, is being forced to squat in a premises in Inchicore whose landlords issued notice to quit in July. The Department of Education has refused to give it any help towards finding an alternative building. A group of parents in a disadvantaged area, trying to live by non sectarian ideals, has been left to stew in its own juice by a Government that never tires of urging those ideals on others.

Their plight is, as Senator Joe O'Toole has put it, "a classic example of the discriminatory funding arrangements in Irish primary schools". If the rights of such parents can be ignored while the rights of unaccountable churchmen are being strengthened, the bigots of Drumcree will have every right to tell the Government where to stuff its platitudes about the evils of sectarianism.