In the hungry 1940s, thousands of people were moved from inner-city Dublin to new housing. As a result, the Sisters of Mercy on Mourne Road, Drimnagh, enrolled 600 six-year-olds in one day. At a time of poverty and an unprecedented increase in population in the area, the children had places in school, writes Breda O'Brien
At the richest time in our history, children in the Balbriggan area have no school to go to. The Department of Education has had to sanction an "emergency school" and, disastrously, all the children attending that school will be black. What does that say about our hopes of welcoming and integrating newcomers?
If one were to believe certain voices, the fault lies with the enrolment policy of the Catholic Church, because it gives preference to Catholic children. The allegation has also been allowed to hang in the ether that the Catholic schools are racist, because it is primarily black children who have no place to go to school.
Ah, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. St Teresa's national school, the largest primary school in Balbriggan, is a typical example. It is a Catholic school with about 480 pupils. From senior infants to sixth class, it has about 100 children of non-Irish origin, or newcomer children. Seventy per cent of that 100 are black. Because the school took an extra class of junior infants this year to help out in the crisis, it has about 90 children in those classes, of whom about half are black and one-third are non-Roman Catholic. Incidentally, siblings of non-Catholic pupils get preference over any new Catholic child with no siblings in the school.
The implication that Catholic schools are racist or exclusive is deeply unjust. Quite frankly, blaming the church for every problem in Ireland is old, tired and unoriginal. The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin has stated clearly that, for historic reasons, the church is over-represented in school patronage, and he has no desire to perpetuate that situation.
In response to another crisis, he agreed to a request from the department to open a school for non-Catholic children in Diswellstown. The negative response to his decision is a classic example of "let no good deed go unpunished".
Here's another interesting catch-22. If a Catholic patron body, usually a parish priest, applies to build a new school, in normal circumstances he has to put forward a request to the New Schools Advisory Committee.
To prove that there is a need for a Catholic school, he will have to show that enough children are being baptised in his parish to justify one. In effect, he is being asked for proof of baptisms before a new Catholic school can be built. If, later on, the same school has the temerity to give priority to Catholic children by asking for baptismal certs, it will be bashed around the head for bigotry.
The problem is not denominational enrolment policies, because even in crisis times non-Catholic children are getting places. The schools in Balbriggan and other urban areas are bursting at the seams. The problem is a disgraceful lack of planning and vision.
Over the past number of years, Fingal County Council has rezoned vast tracts of land for housing. In fairness to the council, it set aside sites for schools in its development plan. These sites cannot be built on by developers until the Department of Education has signalled that it is not going to use them. Yet while the school sites remain just sites, thousands of houses have been built. Much of the blame must be laid at the feet of the department. Its model of response to the need for schools probably last worked well in the 1970s.
One Catholic primary school principal in Balbriggan has a four-inch file of correspondence on his desk dating from 1999, begging the department for an extension to his school. Nothing happened until 2006, when moves to grant permission began.
In the meantime, for some six years, a pattern was repeated each year. Streams of parents, Irish and non-Irish, came to the school, asking for places. By September, he would have enough children to justify extra teaching staff.
On October 1st, he would write to the department looking for, yet again, an extension and, failing that, prefabs. He would be left hanging until February or March before getting a prefab sanctioned. Then he would have to go through the whole planning process, securing an architect, contractor and so on. On one occasion, a prefab was getting its final fit-out virtually as children came through the door.
In this school, the department spends €10,000 a month on prefab rental. It could have built an extension with the money. It is disgraceful waste, and shambolic planning.
In countries such as the Netherlands and France, the school is often the first place to be built and opened, even before the houses are all built or occupied. In an ideal world, every new large development would have schools, health centres, urban recreation spaces, arts facilities and shopping facilities. What do we do in Ireland? We throw up the houses and build massive commercial shopping centres. We like living in a low-tax economy, but we don't like the low-tax infrastructure we get as a result.
The lack of places in schools is a symptom of a far deeper problem. Fingal is the fastest growing county in Ireland. It is growing by the equivalent of the population of Leitrim every three years. The 2006 census showed that Fingal has 50,000 people of non-Irish origin.
Balbriggan attracted lots of investor-buyers who bought houses to rent them out. These private rental houses attracted disproportionate numbers of people of non-Irish origin with fully-formed families, and a significant number of them are in receipt of rent support. If policies are not put in place to welcome and integrate these newcomers, places like Balbriggan are a recipe for social chaos within a generation.
In reality, the schools, both denominational and multidenominational, are the only places making serious efforts to integrate newcomers, often in spite of the Byzantine processes of the Department of Education. If we leave it only to them, the long-term consequences do not bear thinking about.