Tuesday September 25 2007
The country is facing an "unacceptable and dangerous" situation unless the State gets involved in proper planning for schools to meet the needs of the increasingly diverse community, it was warned yesterday.
The current faith-based system of education provision meant that children from religious minorities would be "disproportionately represented at the bottom of the queue for places".
The warning came as the new multi-denominational Educate Together school, Bracken NS, opened in Balbriggan, Co Dublin with 80 pupils, overwhelmingly from an ethnic minority background.
The school has four classes, two junior infants and two multi-grades covering students from senior infants to fifth class.
The school was an emergency response to demand in the Balbriggan area, to accommodate pupils for whom there was no space in other local schools, predominantly Catholic, which operate a Catholics-first policy.
Educate Together chief executive Paul Rowe said yesterday they had no evidence of racist policies being implemented by school authorities in the Balbriggan area.
The reason for the ethnic mix of the new school were complex, but chiefly to do with the chronic failure of planning for new schools in new communities.
Neither was there evidence of institutionalised racism in the Irish education system, but there was profound, embedded and institutionalised religious discrimination throughout the system, particularly at primary level, said Mr Rowe. "This discrimination is the responsibility of the State, not of schools or religious bodies.
"It is inevitable that, in a system where 98pc of schools are faith-based and permitted to prefer members of their faith in enrolments, those not of the majority religions will be disproportionately represented at the bottom of the queue for places. This is unacceptable and dangerous. It is essential that the State ensures that there are sufficient places in schools operating on the basis of equality in all areas.
"Only then can we ensure that parents have equal access to education and that no one is compelled to choose a faith-based school against their conscience."
He said international experience had demonstrated that there was an intersection between religious and racial discrimination and that, if religious discrimination went unchecked, racist division was almost inevitable.
Educate Together wants the Government to amend planning legislation to require the transfer of sites for schools as a condition of planning permission for housing estates, "the root cause of school place shortages in new suburban areas".
Mr Rowe acknowledged that change was afoot and said they had met with department officials last week to plan for schools for 2008. "There are strong indications of a real effort to get a handle on this question.
"We would hope that measures like this would reduce the likelihood of other emergency situations such as emerged this summer", he said.