Proposals by Richard Bruton, the education minister, to tackle religious bias in the admission policies of schools represent another tentative step by a government to address an issue that has grown in significance as Ireland has made its transition from a dominant Catholic culture to a secular society.
The country’s education system has failed to keep pace with 21st-century Ireland, which has been characterised by burgeoning multiculturalism. Despite falling attendances at weekly religious services and a growing number of couples who decide to be married in civil ceremonies, 96 per cent of state-funded schools remain under the patronage of a religious denomination. Of these, almost 90 per cent are Catholic schools, reflecting the church’s historic role in Irish education.
Announcing details of his initiative in Dublin yesterday, Mr Bruton acknowledged that there was a mismatch between the religious ethos of schools and the background of students who wished to attend them.
Such a preponderance of religious and particularly Catholic schools has meant that many non-Catholics have had difficulty in finding a place for their children in their local area in recent years. Some parents, often in an act of desperation, have had their children baptised against their own personal preferences to ensure a place in the school of their choice.
Research commissioned by Equate, a children and family rights’ group, found that 24 per cent of parents said that they would not have had their children baptised if they had not needed to for gaining access to a school.
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Under current legislation, it is legally permissible for schools with a particular religious ethos to discriminate against applicants in their admission policies on grounds of religion. The problem is effectively confined to the 20 per cent of the country’s primary and secondary schools that are over-subscribed, which are predominantly found in large towns and cities where the diversity of students is also most pronounced.
Campaigners seeking to have the “baptism barrier” removed argue that the government should be able to link the removal of any discriminatory admissions policy with the provision of public funding.
A reluctance on the part of successive governments to address the issue has often been based on a belief that the constitution provides specific safeguards to ensure that religious schools are able to protect their ethos. This has been used as an argument to resist calls for the amendment of section 7 (3) (c) of the Equal Status Act 2000. The legislation prohibits discrimination by educational establishments on nine specific grounds, including religion, but the specific clause grants an exception for denominational schools to discriminate on grounds of religion in admissions.
Conor O’Mahony, a senior lecturer in law at University College Cork, is one of several legal experts who believe that such a defence by politicians for non-action is misplaced because the Oireachtas enjoys wide discretion in balancing competing constitutional rights — in this case arguing that the competing rights to religious education and to the protection against religious discrimination can be rebalanced through linking public funding to schools who do not apply a baptism barrier.
Mr Bruton has set out four options for the admissions policies of schools — either based on catchment areas, the “nearest school rule”, and a quota system or an outright ban on the use of religion as a selection criteria — and the latter is favoured by groups who believe that schools should mirror pluralism in wider Irish society.
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In a view representative of some of the minority religions, the Church of Ireland has warned that a prohibition of using religion as a factor in admissions would see the ethos of its existing schools diluted by having to accept students with different faiths or none at all.
The church’s perspective highlights the complexity of the task facing the minister in trying to strike a balance between competing interests. He will have to jump through many legal and administrative hoops.
The slow rate of progress in official plans, first announced six years ago, to alter the patronage of schools by getting various religious bodies to divest themselves from involvement in primary schools does not augur well for any swift implementation of Mr Bruton’s proposals.
Underlying all such concerns is the bigger question of whether religious education is itself a suitable subject to be taught in the classroom.