There now seems to be a wide consensus in Ireland that discrimination is not acceptable and that school segregation in its various forms is not viable in the long term.
More and more people have been questioning the current education system on that basis.
A growing number of parents have made themselves heard over the past few years, not least through the National Parents’ Council: one of its former heads declared some years ago that education in the schools belonged or should belong to “us, the citizens of Ireland” – and not to various private mentors or patrons.
Representative organisations for both teachers and school principals have consistently come out in favour of a system of national schools that would be neutral in religious terms and that would cater equally to all children, a position that has been solidly supported in successive opinion polls over recent years.
The Catholic Church might have insisted on its right to "its" schools in the past, but as John Horgan pointed out in The Irish Times recently, the Pope himself does not see any contradiction between freedom of religion and the fully secular state.
On the contrary, he sees the secular state, with the separation of church and state in all its institutions, as the best guarantee for religious freedom.
This view is already shared by other Catholic hierarchies in a number of secular countries, including the US and France.
Other religious authorities may be in a less dominant position in Irish education, but these issues concern them as well.
All of these social developments point to both the necessity and the possibility of radical structural change in the Irish education system at this time.
Such a change would have little impact on most of the educational content (though it may actually spur some exciting new developments). The teachers and school buildings would still be there, but it would put an end to very many routine instances of discrimination within the system and it would have a huge effect on how individual parents and children may feel in terms of both their basic human rights – such as equal access to schools and freedom of religion – and their sense of belonging to wider society.
The series of political measures over the past 15 years have not addressed the main issues at either local or national level.
Change has been incremental. While in other areas gradual change might be the best solution, this has actually become part of the problem: not only is there now agreement among specialists that the capacity for incremental change is itself limited within the existing system, but those incremental political measures actually risk making things worse.
There are plans, for example, to introduced a new subject about religions – Education about Religion and Beliefs – in the same school day as a form of catechetical education, for example.
Some might talk about a “pragmatic” perspective, or one that may be easier politically.
But we should also keep in mind that pragmatism at the expense of principles has very direct, very real, consequences on adults and children who are made to feel different from the person next door.
Even in national community schools today, there are still children who are explicitly labelled as “other”, for the purpose of separate religious education.
Both Irish and international research in the field of education has repeatedly shown that school segregation is not the best way to build a truly inclusive, harmonious society.
The current political drift towards further diversification or fragmentation of the system also seems to abandon the notion of the local school, the school of the local community, which was actually one of the main strengths of the Irish primary school system.
For all these reasons, the major issue that now needs to be addressed politically is who should State-funded schools belong to/be controlled by? Various private patrons – or the Irish people themselves?
The State might have wished to relinquish authority and control to others up to now, but it actually – and quite logically – remains responsible for what goes on in publicly-funded schools.
There is now a unique opportunity for Irish society as a whole, through democratic debate and not by delegation to private patrons, to reclaim its education system and to base it on explicit, common principles.
I suggest we look at recent developments in Quebec, Canada, for inspiration. Until recently the situation in Quebec bore an uncanny resemblance to the Irish situation.
Up to 1998, the Quebec education system was controlled by the main Christian Churches but financed by the State.
New orientations on intercultural education were adopted in 1986 in response to the cultural and religious diversification of the population; it then took several more years for the project of reform of the education system to come to fruition.
After much public debate, a general convention on education established in 1995 concluded that “there was no valid reason any more, other than a historical hang-up, to constrain a public education system on the basis of denominational privileges”.
In 1998, a new piece of legislation replaced the system of denominational control with new committees, or boards.
In 2000, another law – the 118 Act – effectively put an end to the denominational status of Quebec schools.
Public education retained a religious dimension at first, with parents asked to choose between a Catholic or Protestant moral and religious course and an ethics course.
However, one of the legislative amendments affirmed the primacy of fundamental rights, specifying that “the educational project of the school must respect the freedom of conscience and of religion of the students, the parents and the school staff”.
Successive Quebec governments invoked a special clause that technically allowed them to maintain this denominational course in schools. In 2005 it was finally decided to comply fully with the constitutional ban on all religious discrimination.
A syllabus of “ethics and religious culture” common to all Quebec schools replaced the former courses on religious and moral education from 2008 onwards.
The Catholic hierarchy broadly accepted the new situation, declaring that from now on the Church would fulfil its responsibility for religious education outside the public school network.
After much debate, the Quebec society and government managed to overcome tensions and find a widely acceptable solution.
This can be done in Ireland too.
Karin Fischer is author of Separate but Equal?: Schools and the Politics of Religion and Diversity in the Republic of Ireland, published by Manchester University Press.
