DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - Archbishop Sean Brady, leader of Ireland's 4 million Roman Catholics, defended the need Wednesday for a separate school system for Catholics in Northern Ireland, an issue long debated in the divided British territory.Brady, in a statement issued to coincide with Catholic Schools Week in Northern Ireland, rejected the argument that sending Catholics and Protestants to segregated schools encouraged social divisions and sowed the seeds for conflict.
The future of Northern Ireland's rival school systems is a top talking point in Northern Ireland, particularly in rural communities with declining student populations.
The British government is pressing both the state-controlled, overwhelmingly Protestant schools and the Catholic schools to share facilities, or even merge, in areas where they cannot justify funding rival schools with half-full classrooms.
For decades, social scientists have argued that one of the most logical ways to mend the traditional hostility between British Protestants and Irish Catholics would be to start with the next generation — and, for the first time, put them daily in the same classrooms.
But Brady, whose church is also deeply embedded in the school system in the neighboring Republic of Ireland, dismissed such views as shallow.
"It is time to end the facile argument that church-based schools are divisive. Commitment to tolerance, justice and the common good is at the very heart of the Catholic vision of education," he said.
Brady also cited the well-documented fact that the Catholic schools in Northern Ireland do better academically than the predominantly Protestant state schools, producing higher test scores and more university-eligible students.
"Those who send their children to Catholic schools have no need to apologize for making that choice. They have a right to a faith-based education for their children," he said.
Since the mid-19th century, Catholic Church leaders have made control of education in Ireland — and, following partition of the island in 1921, Northern Ireland — a key demand in talks with both the British and Irish governments.
North of the border, they have criticized the arguments of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education, which since the 1980s has developed about 50 schools that deliberately mix Protestant, Catholic and other children.
Less than 5 percent of the approximately 200,000 students in Northern Ireland, a territory of 1.7 million, attend deliberately integrated schools.
These schools encourage students to discuss their political and religious differences and also to play the sports associated with both sides of the community: Gaelic football and hurling on the Catholic side, rugby and soccer on the Protestant side.
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