The item you have kindly ruled as in order to raise on the Adjournment raises a very fundamental issue. It is a matter which I think has caused a great deal of public disquiet. Indeed, the wording I used to place it before this House was:
In view of the public disquiet following media reports of the guidelines circulated to members of the Catholic Managers Association the need for the Minister for Education to confirm that these guidelines which restrict appointments to practising Roman Catholics are not the ones which will prevail in the making of appointments as National Teachers and that professional qualifications and competence as a potential teacher will be the criteria that the Department of Education will require.
I said I believed the matter is of the most serious import. I was in Belfast when I read The Irish Times report of Tuesday, 19 November. Before the ink was dry on the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, page one of The Irish Times contained the headline “National Schools to employ only practising Catholics”. That report, credited to Christina Murphy, was a matter that had been raised previously by the education correspondent of the Irish Independent Mr. John Walsh, and it referred to guidelines that had been circulated and interviews that had been given by the secretary of the Catholic Primary School Managers' Association, which they said represented a clarification in policy, a clarification of the existing situation. They quote Rev. Gerard Walsh, on page one of The Irish Times of that day, as saying. “It has always been the policy of the schools to hire only practising Catholics”; and later: “As a result, I issued a series of about 50 criteria to the boards which they might consider including. It was obvious that the requirement to be a practising Catholic should be one of them.” These criteria had been issued after what I believe was an admirable development from the Minister for Education, for which I congratulate her. She had been discussing for some time, in her Department — and I as a member of the Women's Rights Committee had participated in discussions — the elimination of sexism in interviewing techniques. The request for clarification drew forth a printed document, which of course we would have welcomed had it dealt with sexism, but it dealt with a number of other guidelines. I have asked this question and I want to put it absolutely clearly. I have absolute respect for the right of any organisation or association in Ireland to hold views but my question to the Minister and the questions that will ensue from it are not the ones that were put to her in the other House. I am not asking her specifically to comment on the 51 items one of which is: Are you a practising Catholic? or “Are you committed to handing on the faith?” I am asking the Minister for Education to give an assurance to the public that the criteria for the appointment, the promotion, the reappointment of a teacher will be based on professional qualifications, experience and competence as a teacher and those criteria only, and that the criteria which may be in the possession of any other interviewer present will not be used to frustrate what would be sound, adequate criteria for the hiring of somebody to teach in Ireland.
I felt aghast when I read the report because here we had been, on the one hand, invited into a pluralist conception, I believe, in which the two islands might grow together, which when people spoke of the undoing of the prejudices and fears which communities in Northern Ireland held towards each other, people spoke about the effects of separate education and about the two sides of the community being educated abroad and then this document appears. I have found myself not being moved by the more humorous aspects on which some commentators have commented and they are indeed curious. What does the phrase "practising Catholic" mean? Maybe the Minister would feel impelled to give us a definition, although probably she will decide not to. Is it to be determined rather like the social welfare contributions, a governing number of contributions in a year? Is it to be so many Mass attendances? Is it to be so many evening devotions with combinations of broken service on Sundays or whatever? There are, to my mind, as somebody who studied the sociology of religion 20 years ago, some incredible lengths to which you could bring such a notion. Is it to deal with inner spirituality, for example, or outward expressed religious fervour? Can you beat the hell out of your wife at home, practice like mad and become an excellent teacher? What does all this mean? One could go on and ask other things which are raised because the guidelines are supposed to be a clarification and apply only to new applicants. There is an excellent letter in The Irish Times of 11 December on page 11. The author of the letter is Des Derwin from Comyn Place in Drumcondra. He makes a point concerning the redundant teacher. If the numbers go down and you become redundant and you need a new job as a teacher do you discover the faith again to get your new job only to lapse again when the numbers go up and then rediscover yourself again when the numbers go down and so on? One could go on and bring all of these points to the limit of absurdity. I do not want to be offensive in that regard. I respect people who believe in their religion; I respect people who believe in religions of several different kinds and I respect people who have a moral and spiritual view of the world that is not locked into either of the competing denominations I have described.
Des Derwin's letter contains the phrase "Catholic teachers". It quotes how the Catholic and Protestant school managers came together and they decided how necessary it was to defend the denominational ethos of their schools. This is referred to explicitly in The Irish Times report of November 19. It states that Father Walsh, the secretary of the Catholic Primary School Managers' Association said: “that the national school system was a denominational one and that the managers of both the Catholic and Protestant national schools at a meeting last year had agreed that it was of vital importance that the religious ethos of their schools should be maintained”.
I want to raise a question that arises fundamentally on the Constitution and direct some questions for answer by the Minister. How does she purport to balance the rights of an individual under the Irish Constitution to be treated with justice and fairness — and I am relying on the Supreme Court's more recent practice of interpreting the Constitution as a total document; how is she going to balance that right against these practices should they prevail and which would probably be justified under Article 42 of the Constitution. I will put it another way. Does the fact that the rights of parents as they are reflected in Article 42 of the Constitution in particular — and in John White's book Church and State in Modern Ireland which, on page 52 in a comment on Article 42, says:
Article 42, on Education, succinctly summarises Catholic teaching on the prior rights of the parents.
It then quotes Article 42.1 of the Constitution:
The State acknowledges that the primary national educator of the child is the Family and guarantees to respect the inalienable rights and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children.
Later on in John White's book when somebody had drawn a comparison between the mother and child controversy and education, the now distinguished Bishop James Kavanagh, then Father James Kavanagh, wrote in The Irish Times of 24 April 1951:
Dr. Browne says in his memorandum that the State, in his health scheme, is providing facilities for parents just as the State provides facilities for primary education. A little reflection will help us to see that there is little parity between the two. In primary education the State rightly assists parents, but it does not control education. It gives grants, and very generous grants, towards the building of schools; it provides the money for the payment of teachers, but the ownership of the schools is not vested in the State. So anxious has been the Irish State always in regard to parental responsibility in the domain of education that it does not give the full cost of the erection of a school — the people have contributed throughout the various parishes of the land some portion of the cost, so that they know the schools are not State schools but theirs.
Now I as a parent with four children attending what I believed were State funded primary schools find them referred to by different people by different names. Officials in the Minister's Department following in continuity from the times of the British legislation in honesty sometimes call them national schools. Those under the control of the Catholic School Managers' Association are called Catholic schools, Church of Ireland schools are sometimes called parochial schools and sometimes other kinds of named schools. Nobody uses the phrase ‘State primary schools' even though they are funded by the State. The salaries are being funded by the State and many people who believe in a pluralist conception in this island want to get beyond denominational faction fighting and want their children to be reared in a pluralist way.
I have a proposition to put to the Minister for which I require an answer because many of my constituents have asked me to seek it. It is this. Can she explain to me how, if I take Article 42 which creates a certain kind of parental right in education, parents managed to transfer that right to a body who can exercise it in their name? What was the mechanism by which the Catholic School Managers' Association acquired the right to speak for the Catholic parents of this country? Was there some national consultation that I did not hear of or are you to tell me that internally an organisation can set up mechanisms of minimal consultation and then purport to exercise the constitutional rights of the parents in the Constitution? Can I say that I am going out tonight to look for a Bahai and then come in tomorrow morning and say: "I now represent the community of Bahai parents in this country and I want school education facilities for them". What were the procedures and how is that right exercised and if I followed on Father Kavanagh that I quoted — and I believe he was interesting in many ways — is there no change now between the feelings of parents in the 1950s and parents in the 1980s? If citizens all over Ireland begin organising themselves and say they want pluralist education North and South, and suppose we had organisations — and I hope they spring up in every parish — called citizens and parents for a pluralist education, people who believe in the importance of the transcendent character of spirituality and who want religion to be studied in a cross-cultural comparative perspective, if they write to the Minister will she then write back and say: "I am sending the inspectors down to decide on a site for your school? What are your numbers? How many teachers will you want? What about the text book provision, the heating allowances?" But perhaps the letter might come back: "Provision exists for the needs in your area". But then I come back to my question: "I used to drive my children to what I thought was the State primary school but I have been told now it is in fact a Catholic school and that the teachers who will teach there may be asked questions as to whether they are practising Catholics and whether in fact they are committed to handing on the faith". You cannot have it both ways. You either have pluralist single stream education at primary level or you have State education and you have denominational education. I see, with a great deal of heaviness in my heart, all this ugly stuff appearing in the papers. The papers are correct to print it, but the manner in which people are locking themselves into their denominations bodes no good for the future.
Is there no protection in the Constitution for pluralism or for people who want pluralist education? I know that what will be quoted back at me is that any child can be removed from a school, educated at home, and so on. I am not interested in the freedom to remove your child from a closed denominational setting. I am interested in the State's responsibilities, laid down in the article, to make provision — I am not talking about setting up those of us who believe in pluralism as deviants — for us in relation to the spending on education. Therefore, the old case that the State makes provision and therefore the control can be exercised elsewhere simply will not do. Do you, for example, make provision for people who hold this conception or do you keep excepting them from the system?
The next point I would like to make is in relation to the relative weight to be given to different groups. At present parents are excluded comprehensively from education. I know that at the Minister's heart is in the idea of parental involvement, and I compliment her for that, but I must say there are not adequate mechanisms for asking the views of parents on education in this country. Let us suppose that in the future a situation developed North and South, in which parents decided that they wanted a particular form of education, is it acceptable in 1985 for us to take the Constitution in its thirties version and to say that you can manage all the new changes you want for your child through the denominational sections of the Constitution, for this is a denominational Constitution? How can you then go up to Belfast and sit down with that kind of an interpretation on education?
It is not Unionist children or Unionist parents who find all of this objectionable and offensive. I am a parent who has four children attending primary school. One school has a manager who is a member of the Church of Ireland, the other school is managed by an order of people who are within the Catholic denomination. I have three children there. The one thing I know about looking at it all is that I would wish there was a school system in which people who believed in Islam and people who believed in Christianity and people who believed in the Jewish religion and people who believed in a form of spirituality that was not located or people who believed in nothing but being human towards each other could meet in the school setting. I take objection to this and I certainly want the people upon whom my taxes are spent in paying their salaries not to be asked sectarian, ugly, narrow questions. How will it ever be judged, to end where I nearly began, about the practising Catholic?
