THE GOVERNMENT has been accused of discriminating against Protestants in the Republic with cuts in the education budget announced last October.
The annual conference of the Methodist Conference in Ireland was also told yesterday that the Minister for Education had failed "to show any real understanding of the effects on Protestant schools of the measures taken".
Speaking to the conference at the Smurfit School in Blackrock, Co Dublin, the general secretary of the church's Board of Education, Dr John Harris, said some of the cuts "seem particularly insensitive" and, at post-primary level, were "considerably severe and particularly so for Protestant fee-charging schools".
He said "Protestant schools now receive a proportionally lower allocation of teachers than in the Catholic sector". Reductions in the pupil-teacher ratio, for instance, would result in the loss of five State-paid teaching posts at Wesley College in Dublin, he said, while cuts in grants would also mean "a loss of almost €250,000 in a full year" there.
He pointed out that in the Republic there were 21 fee-charging Protestant secondary schools, many of which were boarding schools. "In order to provide for Protestant pupils in areas where there is no Protestant second-level school, it is essential that boarding facilities are available if they are to have to opportunity to attend a school with an ethos in keeping with the wishes of parents," he said.
Yet these 21 secondary schools "seem to have been specifically targeted for the harshest cuts", he said. He said the Minister had claimed these schools were only being brought into line with the fee-charging Catholic schools.
"The reality is that these 21 schools have had more taken away from them by these cuts than any other sector. It also means that Protestant schools now receive a proportionally lower allocation of teachers than in the Catholic sector. It is hard to see how this kind of discrimination can be justified," he said.
He recalled that when free education was introduced in 1967, special provision was made for Protestant and other minority faith schools "so that they could be treated equitably". Since then they had been able to avail of the same basic grants and benefits as other schools in the free scheme.
"This is now suddenly no longer the case," he said.
The cuts had "caused distress to all involved in the provision of education for Protestants", he said. He also commented that "we are very conscious that there are some people with an agenda which aims to eliminate faith schools altogether and to withdraw all State funding from the fee-paying sector in particular".
He called on delegates to "join with the other Protestant denominations in seeking to have our schools treated more fairly, as they have been in the past".
Dealing with education in Northern Ireland, the Rev Trevor Jamieson told the conference that "education is a very fraught area at this point in time". The situation in Northern Ireland, where the post-primary transfer issue was concerned, "has vexed us for some time," he said. "It is children who are suffering as a result of the inability of the politicians to reach an accommodation" on education.
He appealed to them "to draw back and establish a commission of educationalists" to deal with the situation, as recommended by the churches last November.
He also said that the Protestant churches now faced losing their right to nominate candidates to school governance bodies in Northern Ireland under equality legislation. He found it strange that "such wrong should be done to the Protestant churches in the name of equality".
