HERE are the questions our growing band of militant secularists needs to consider with respect to education: does a religion have a right to establish a school that caters to its members, and does such a school have a right to receive State funding?These questions arise in the context of reporting on overcrowding in schools that saw RTE make the Catholic Churc h the outright villain of the piece.
The new primary school year began on Monday and RTE was straight out to Balbriggan in north county Dublin to report on the fact that an emergency school has had to be opened to cater for almost 100 non-ethnic Irish, overwhelmingly Africans, who could not get into the local Catholic schools.
Blame
The finger of blame was pointed straight at those schools because of their 'Catholics first' enrolment policy. Isn't it unacceptable, asked the RTE journalists, that schools should have the right to discriminate on the basis of religion?
RTE was right to go out to Balbriggan but wrong to lay most of the blame at door of the Catholic Church.
As the Archdiocese of Dublin pointed out in a statement - to which the RTE news department gave short shrift - what is happening in places like Balbriggan is the result of bad planning and not the result of an excessively denominational school system in Ireland.
Here is the fact that RTE news should have had front and centre all this week: there are not enough classroom places in areas like Balbriggan, period.
To put this another way, even if every school in the country was State-run and non-denominational, there still wouldn't have been enough classroom places and there still would, without a doubt, have been a panic-stricken dash to set up new schools as the new academic year approached.
RTE should have directed more of its ire at those in charge of anticipating demand for amenities in the rapidly growing satellite towns around Dublin.
Surely it has occurred to RTE news that if, for example, our road system has not kept up with the growth of our population, our school system wouldn't either?
Accusations
If RTE news had done a little digging it would have found that some Catholic schools are having to turn away Catholic, as well as non-Catholic children.
That is how overstretched and overburdened some schools are.
One of the worst accusations hurled at the Catholic Church this week is that it is guilty of "educational apartheid" in that its schools are allegedly accepting only white, Catholic children.
This appaling and emotive smear is a gross disservice to the many Catholic principals who are doing their best to accommodate Ireland's burgeoning native and immigrant populations.
RTE news, for example, could have sent out a camera crew to St John the Evangelist, the new Catholic primary school in Adamstown.
According to the Catholic Primary School Managers Association, 90pc of the children going to this new school belong to minority ethnic groups, and of the 90pc, half are non-Catholic.
Is this "educational apartheid"?
Or how about the enormous numbers of Poles, Nigerians and Filipinos being absorbed into Catholic schools?
Muslim parents also commonly favour Catholic schools if there is no available Muslim school because they have a good religious ethos and are single sex.
The Catholic Church has made a convenient scapegoat this week for the mess facing our educational system in some places.
The Government and the local authorities are happy to see it blamed because it distracts attention from their own lack of planning.
Liberals are happy to see it blamed because they don't like Catholic schools and they want to bring down the denominational system.
This brings us back to the questions at the top of this article.
The question isn't only whether religious schools should have a right to discriminate in favour of their own members, but whether publicly-funded religious schools have a right to exist at all, and indeed whether even privately-funded religious schools have a right to exist.
It is that fundamental.
Secularist opinion - which is becoming much more aggressive by the day - effectively maintains that a religion does not have a right to set up a school aimed at its own members.
Secularists firmly believe that Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Muslims and Jews should not have their very own freedom to establish Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Muslim and Jewish schools.
The reason for this opposition is that secularists elevate the principle of non-discrimination above all others, including religious freedom and the freedom of expression.
Religious schools by their very definition, will discriminate in favour of their own members and then in favour of their own ethos.
Our ever more militant secularists want to take control of the State and ensure that only schools which adhere to their absolutist principle of non-discrimination should enjoy State-funding and that schools which base themselves on religious principles, or some other set of principles, should not.
What has happened in Balbriggan and other parts of the country this week isn't the result of our denominational system.
What has happened is, as the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin says, the result of bad planning.
But the real issue here is the huge desire of some people to see an end to all State-backed religious schools, starting with the Catholic ones.
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