It is that time of the year when interest groups make
their case for protection from yet another recessionary budget.
Among
these groups can be found the Republic’s fee-charging second-level
schools, and the Protestant schools in this sector particularly.
In
the arguments advanced annually by this group it is held that in the
late 1960s the government promised to protect Protestants and their
involvement in second-level education.
It is argued that this deal, and
with it the security of a well-established religious minority, is being
unpicked. There has been much talk of promises broken and constitutional
rights violated.
The notion that Ireland’s
Protestant minority requires fee-charging schools as citadels for
protection is worth challenging.
For one thing, there are Protestant
schools in the free education sector: five comprehensive schools and two
secondary schools, with a new school planned for Wicklow.
How is it
that Protestant students in the catchment areas of these can secure
Government-subsidised grants to attend fee- charging Protestant schools?
Such are the anomalies of the scheme that a Church of Ireland
student could forgo a free education in a second- level school under
Church of Ireland patronage and receive a grant to attend a Presbyterian
or Methodist one.
Unique entitlement
Indeed, the Republic’s Protestants are unique in their entitlement to such a grant to attend Sandford Park, which claims to be non-denominational.
Why are Hindus, Muslims and atheists excluded from such protection?
This
should not be read as an attack on the subsidy scheme for Protestant
fee- charging schools as a whole. It was designed with a specific
purpose in mind which it fulfils. The scheme is administered by people
who work conscientiously to administer it in a fair and compassionate
manner. A brief overview shows there is another side.
In
September 1967 the State began rolling out a scheme providing free
second-level education to all children in the Republic.
It proved
difficult to implement in the Protestant sector.
The dispersed nature of
the State’s Protestant community had resulted in an inefficient network
of small schools and a dependency on boarding schools, while the
absence of teaching orders meant Protestant schools had to pay all
their teachers salaries commensurate with secular life.
Where
possible the State sought to build large comprehensive schools under
Protestant patronage. Otherwise it sought to subsidise existing
secondary schools.
These schemes were hijacked by
opponents of Protestant comprehensive schools who feared they were
Trojan horses intended to rob Protestants of their entitlement to
privileged positions in society.
One argument submitted by the Church of
Ireland to the Department of the Taoiseach in 1969 held that vocational
schools did not have an environment suitable for Protestant pupils, in
part because they lacked extracurricular activities, were understaffed,
the teachers were underqualified, class sizes were too large and their
emphasis was for “pupils who had aptitudes distinctly biased in favour
of hand and eye subjects”.
This was Protestantism defended as a caste,
not as a religious belief system.
‘Ne Temere’
Another concern was the fear of the 1908 papal decree known as Ne Temere, with which the Catholic Church insisted that in mixed marriages involving a Catholic partner the children must be raised Catholic.
It
was feared the student body of Protestant comprehensive schools would be
leavened with too many Catholics, threatening the community’s
homogeneity.
This vanguard campaigned aggressively
and successfully to limit the scope of Protestant comprehensive
education and made sure free education would be only a minority
component of Protestant second-level education in the Republic.
This
legacy has lasted to the present.
Whether it continues is at the heart
of the current debate.