Race or ethnic origin has nothing to do with the admission criteria for Catholic schools, the chairman of the Irish Catholic Bishops' Education Commission has said. Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent, reports.
Bishop Leo O'Reilly said "suggestions from some quarters - not, I stress, from the Equality Authority - of racially motivated admission policies in Catholic schools are either misinformed or malicious".
However, he said the assumption behind the Equality Authority's recent statement in relation to enrolment in faith schools was "mistaken". That assumption was "that the reason for preferring Catholic students in a particular area to students of other faiths or none is in order to maintain the ethos of the school".
Whereas that might be so if those of other faiths seeking admission were the majority, it was hardly ever the case, he said.
"In fact, the reason for preferring Catholic students in most situations is that the church founds schools and invests in schools in order to provide a Catholic education for its members. It does this in response to the desire of Catholic parents to have their children educated in Catholic schools and in doing so it invests heavily in providing sites for schools, personnel for management and administrative support for boards of management," he said.
This was "in addition to the tax contributions made by Catholics as well as by everybody else in society". The point at issue then was "not the need to maintain the ethos of the school, but rather whether Catholic parents have the right to provide an education for their children in accordance with their own convictions. This right is enshrined in the Constitution and also in many international instruments," he said.
He noted that "the tenor of many of the contributions to the debate in the past couple of weeks would give the impression that claiming this right was a peculiarly Irish Catholic aberration". "In fact it is nothing of the sort," he said.
The right of parents to choose the kind of education that their children should receive was enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and underpinned by the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights, he said.
It was also guaranteed in the Constitution. "The Catholic Church, in upholding the constitutional rights of Catholic parents to the provision of Catholic education for their children, welcomes the exercise of this right by parents of other faith traditions as well," he said.
"To say that the Catholic Church, or any other church or faith group are guilty of discrimination because they give preference to members of their own church or faith is akin to blaming the GAA for giving preference to the supporters of Cork and Kerry when distributing the tickets for the All-Ireland final," he said.
The real issue was the provision of alternative models of patronage to meet a changing, pluralist society's needs, he said.