MULTI-CULTURAL, multi-faith Ireland must have multi-faith, multi-cultural schools. But how many, and who wants them?The question of our schools has reared its head again this week because of difficulties in Dublin West. The population there is growing so fast, the existing schools (just like the rest of the local infrastructure) cannot keep up with demand.
The result is that Catholic schools in the area can't cope with demand from Catholic parents and even though they are accommodating children from non-Catholic and non-Christian homes, many children from those homes have nowhere to go.
As an emergency response to this, the Department of Education has, oddly, asked the Catholic Church to act as a patron for a new school that will open this September. How can this be? Why on earth would you ask the Catholic Church to act as a patron to a new school intended in large part for non-Catholic children?
Educate Together is up in arms. Educate Together schools are multi-denominational. They are aimed at children of all faiths and none. They provide moral and spiritual education which exposes all pupils to all the major faiths, although parents can have their children opt out of these classes if they wish. Therefore, Educate Together sounds like it would have made the perfect patron for this new school.
Certainly this has been the knee-jerk reaction of the chattering classes who regard Educate Together schools as a wonderful antidote to all those awful, exclusive, "closed-minded" denominational schools, the Catholic ones especially.
Our chattering classes firmly believe - nay, it is an unquestioned article of faith - that our present, overwhelmingly denominational school system does not reflect modern Ireland, and so it must change. Who, other than a slack-jawed yokel, could believe otherwise?
Well, quite possibly a lot of those newly-arrived migrants. We hear a lot about how Ireland is becoming multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural.
Actually, the extent of the change is often greatly exaggerated. We are becoming ever more multi-ethnic, and somewhat more multi-cultural, but more multi-faith? Not really, not according to the new Census.
What Census 2006 tells us is that 87pc of the population is still happy to describe itself as Catholic. The number of people living here has grown by a massive 300,000 since Census 2002, but the percentage of Catholics in the population has hardly budged despite this, and despite all the immigration.
Why is that? It's because the majority of immigrants are Catholic.
Think of all those Poles and Filipinos and Nigerians. Most of the rest are Christian, consisting mainly of Protestants and Evangelicals of one sort or another, or else are members of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which are very close theologically to the Catholic Church.
What about members of the non-Christian religions? Hindus and Buddhists now number 6,500 each and Muslims 35,500. Between them, that's only about one per cent of the population.
In other words, Ireland isn't really becoming more multi-faith. In fact, immigration might even be making us more Christian, more religious, and even more Catholic, because many immigrants are much more fervent in their faith than we are.
What, therefore, is really driving the push for a greater number of non-denominational and multi-denominational schools? It isn't all those migrants, except in atypical areas like Dublin West where plenty of non-Christian migrants live.
No, it's all those lapsed Catholic parents who have become thoroughly secularised and can't bear the idea that they must send their children to a Catholic school because it's the only one available.
Very well, that is their prerogative. No, it's more than that. It's their right. No matter which angle you approach it from, it suits no-one to have these secularised, maybe anti-Catholic parents feeling obliged to send their children to Catholic schools.
It doesn't suit them and it can't suit the Catholic school either because suddenly it finds itself having to accommodate parents who would rather be sending their children elsewhere. With the best will in the world, this has to have a corrosive effect on the ethos of the school.
The only answer to this is to build more schools, or if necessary and if it's not too wild an idea, sub-divide existing ones if some suitable agreement can be made with the Catholic Church, or whichever is the relevant denomination.
However, those who are driving for big changes to our school system should stop hiding behind all those migrants and insisting that the changes they want are really in the interests of immigrants.
In most cases migrants are happy with our denominational school system because most migrants are Catholic or Christian.
The real pressure on Church schools, therefore, isn't coming from migrants, it's coming from our own home-grown secularists. Let's not pretend otherwise.
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