IN her new book Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, Mary Kenny expresses the view that George Bernard Shaw "got it right when he said `In Ireland the people is the Church and the Church is the people.'" It is a useful quote, especially in the context of the current debate on the Education Bill. It expresses in a very few words the case for copperfastening denominational control of schools.
Since the Church (or, at a pinch, the Churches) are the people, then having bishops and religious orders controlling our education system is, by definition, an exercise in popular sovereignty. With one bound, our hero is free of awkward questions like democracy, accountability and pluralism.
The only problem with the quotation, though, is that Shaw said nothing of the sort. One of his characters, Peter Keegan in John Bull's Other Island, says something very vaguely like it. But identifying the thoughts of characters with those of their authors is a dangerous business.
It makes as much sense as a claim that "James Joyce got it right when he said `The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken and they must be obeyed'," simply because a character in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man expresses that view.
And in any case, what Shaw's Peter Keegan - a defrocked priest - has to say is rather different. He is asked for his version of heaven and he replies that "it is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people ... It is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped... a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine ... In short, it is the dream of a madman."
It is, in other words, a vision of what things might be like if, instead of having hierarchies handing down religious orthodoxies, life itself was suffused with the spiritual values that get lost when churches become institutions for the holding and wielding of power.
Mary Kenny's misquotation has, however, the considerable value of bringing us to the nub of the often confusing and weary debates about the churches and education. For what is so often ignored in those debates is the simple and obvious reality that the church is not the people. Or, to put it another way, the beliefs, values and aspirations of, for instance, members of the Catholic Church in Ireland, cannot be simply subsumed into the orthodoxies of the Pope, the cardinals, or the bishops.
The ideology of church control is based on an apparently simple progression of inferences. The Constitution gives parents the right to decide on their children's education. Most of the parents belong to certain churches. Therefore, those churches must control most of the schools. It is, as Mr Spock might say, entirely logical.
But, as any Star Trek fan can tell you, there is a qualification that has to be applied to Mr Spock's relentless logic: insufficient data do not compute.
The missing data in this case are the infinite complexity of values and beliefs that lies behind mere membership of a particular church.
If the values of all Irish Catholics were the same as those of their bishops, the divorce referendum would have been defeated by 90 per cent to 10. If the values of all Irish Protestants were the same as those of their leaderships, Drumcree would have been a non event. Every significant Irish religious tradition - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic - contains within it sharply different attitudes to all sorts of social, sexual and political issues.
THE recent demands from all the church leaders for a strengthening of their own control over schools are made, not in spite of these divisions in their ranks, but because of them. In an MRBI poll for The Irish Times late last year just a fifth of Irish Catholics said that they followed the teaching of their church when making "serious moral decisions", compared to 78 per cent who said they would follow their own conscience.
If I were a bishop thinking about the maintenance of my power in the near future, I would conclude that unless I dig myself into the infrastructures of Irish life now, it may soon be too late.
And the evidence is that, for both teachers and parents, this concern for individual conscience extends into choices about education. A 1993 survey by Lansdowne Market Research into the attitudes of Irish adults born in the 1960s - the new generation of parents - found that 52 per cent of Dubliners and 61 per cent of those outside Dublin preferred non denominational to religious controlled schools.
A recent extensive survey of primary teachers likewise suggested that 56 per cent of them would prefer their schools to be multi denominational or non denominational, rather than under the control of a religious patron.
The Education Bill, even as it stands, fails to take account of these realities. Where a new school is established, those who are setting it up can choose their patron, though, in a rather unnecessary intrusion, their choice has to be approved by the Minister for Education. But for all existing primary and post primary schools, the present patrons and trustees - in most cases, the non elected holders of religious offices - are to be confirmed automatically in that status.
This is bad enough, but the proposals put forward by the churches are worse. The education commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland is campaigning for the patrons to be given huge statutory powers. If they get their way - and Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats have been making sympathetic noises - the local bishop, mullah or rabbi will have, in law as well as in fact, "a right to require that the school protects and promotes particular principles".
THE elected board of management will be required to support the "cultural, educational, moral, religious or social values" articulated by the patron. It will manage the school, not on behalf of the parents, the teachers or even the pupils, but "on behalf of the patron". The school plan "shall be subject to the approval of the patron." And the patron will have an effective veto over all staff appointments, dismissals and suspensions.
The public is therefore being presented in the debate on the Education Bill with a "choice" between a great deal of church control on the one hand and almost total church control on the other. Multi denominational and non denominational schools are seen, either way, as an added extra, a new sector to be created in a future when the educational sector as whole will be shrinking anyway.
The rather obvious solution to the problem of creating a pluralistic education system - that the partners in each school should be free to decide on its religious and social ethos - is hardly being discussed at all.
But then, the great advantage of the Church and the people being the same thing is that the messy complexity of the people can be ignored in favour of the righteous certainties of their clerical leaders.