THE CATHOLIC Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has strongly criticised Government funding for education and healthcare, as well as its policy on integration.
He also called for "a new theory of pluralism" in Ireland and said that, while he was proud of what was achieved in Catholic education in Ireland, he was "ashamed of what happened" in some cases.
The archbishop was delivering the NUI Convocation Centenary Annual Public Lecture in Maynooth last night, on the "Role of Education in the New Ireland". He was tempted, he said, to alter that title to the "Role of Education is the New Ireland".
He said "sadly", while education contributed decisively to Ireland's unprecedented growth and wealth, not enough of the fruits of this had been poured back into education in a focused way.
We still had "school buildings which are not up to adequate standards", we were "slow in addressing the needs of our international children" and we still had "schools with very high class sizes".
We had "not got the process of planning right" and "there is very little thought being given to pre-school education for a future in which most grannies, who now do so much childcare, will be working grannies."
Meanwhile, "virtually every recent review of the Irish third-level sector, in fact, has concluded that there is a major funding deficit by comparison with relevant international competitors".
"One cannot help feeling that these deficiencies should have been addressed when economic resources were plentiful.
"They will, unfortunately, not be adequately addressed if or when those resources become less. An economic programme which underestimated the value of investment in education clearly misunderstood the nature of a modern economy."
Dr Martin added: "One sees, I might say, a similar failure in healthcare where structures have been created and capacity generated which now cannot be used because the question of ongoing resourcing had not been adequately addressed in advance.
"Bad planning is bad use of public resources. One can create balanced books through the under-utilisation of resources or capacity, but what you are really doing is falsely calculating the real costs of healthcare or education."
Integration required a positive decision by a community, he said, but there was "also a sense in which government policy contributes to such a flight from diversity, when it does not ask all patron bodies to equitably share the burdens and challenges of diversity."
He feared that in Ireland, "the desire in certain secularist thought to reduce religion entirely to the private sphere may make it harder to welcome fully the strong religious commitment of many of our immigrant communities". Immigrants had brought with them "not a more secular society but religious revival".
Dr Martin added: "Our pluralist New Ireland needs a new theory of pluralism" and "a truly pluralist, multicultural society will be genuinely tolerant and respectful to all forms of search for the truth."
