Sir, – Brian Mooney provides persuasive arguments for removing religious instruction from schools ("Should we expect Catholic schools to transmit faith?", Education Opinion, September 7th). His words carry added authority given his decades of experience working within the Irish Catholic school system.
It is refreshing to hear Brian Mooney acknowledge that many teachers are not practising members of any religious community. In effect, their teaching contracts impose a system of enforced hypocrisy in which their human rights to freedom of religion and belief and freedom of conscience are systematically breached.
Opponents of change will often seek to portray those calling for it as “anti-Catholic”, an argument that is blunted when those calls come from professional educationalists working within the very system they seek to defend, not to mention from figures in the church itself.
The more difficult truth is that the church and its teachings are simply irrelevant to a growing cohort of the population, including many families with children attending church-run schools. These families do not require their children to receive religious instruction and do not consent to it.
As with all public services the buck stops with the State, which has failed to put effective measures in place to protect children and teachers from religious discrimination.
As this debate rages on the pages of your newspaper, the silence from Minister for Education Norma Foley and her department is deafening. – Yours, etc,
DAVID GRAHAM,
Communications Officer,
Education Equality,
Malahide,Co Dublin.
Sir, –Brian Mooney makes a good case as to why schools should not be expected to transmit the Christian faith.
Neither he nor other commentaries seem to realise that in the Church of Ireland preparation for confirmation has always been done in the parishes. When I became Capital of Kilkenny College, I discovered that candidates for confirmation were being presented by the college without any preparation. I immediately stopped that and devolved preparation to the parishes. – Yours, etc,
ROBERT MacCARTHY,
(Former Dean
of St Patrick’s),
Dublin 8.