IPPN

Published: 22 June 2009

It is very hard to know where exactly Labour's education spokesman Ruairi Quinn stands on the subject of denominational schools.

One minute he's doing his best impersonation of Senator Joe McCarthy who was famously paranoid about communist infiltration of the US State Department. Ruairi seems to think the Department of Education has been infiltrated by -- gasp! -- Opus Dei or the Knights of St Columbanus. I might as well say it's been infiltrated by the Freemasons.

But the next minute Mr Quinn seems willing to let the Churches have a continued role in our schools, and with public money to boot. He implied as much in a press release on Wednesday.

Then again, when debating me on 'The Last Word' the other day he seemed to think state funding of denominational schools is somehow illegitimate. So he is sending out very mixed signals on this subject.

However, whatever Mr Quinn may think, other leftists are crystal clear; they want state-funded schools to be nationalised and they are exploiting the Ryan report to this end.

Their initial target is the Catholic Church, but the other churches know that if Catholics lose this fight, so will they.

Last weekend, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Paul Colton, commented on the Ryan report. He said that in the debate about the report, only the victims should matter and that "all other agendas should be set aside".

He said that some people "have used the report as a springboard towards a secularising agenda", while "others have called unthinkingly for the withdrawal of all churches from their modern-day engagement with education in a country, which, according to the last census, is still manifestly religious in its affiliation".

Far better that a Church of Ireland bishop said this than a Catholic one, and how typical it was that Bishop Colton's remarks received so little coverage. It didn't suit the secularising agenda he spoke about, an agenda driven mostly by RTE, the 'Irish Times', and the Labour Party which together act as a sort of Secular Trinity.

When Ruairi Quinn warned that the Department of Education may be infiltrated by nefarious organisations, he was trying to explain the 'deferential' attitude of the department towards the Church. But there is no such attitude.

In the last 15 years, for example, not one new Catholic secondary school has been approved by the Department of Education. If the department was so deferential you'd imagine it might have approved just one or two such schools in areas that currently have none, and where there is genuine demand.

Noel Merrick, of the Catholic Secondary School Managers' Association, asked last year in light of the above whether the State had "closed its mind to the possibility of new Catholic schools?"

And if the department was deferential to religion in general, then why has state funding to Protestant schools been cut by €2m?

In reality, if the Department of Education is deferential to anyone, it is to the teachers' unions, but that is a story for another day.

In this debate we need to tackle two questions. The first is whether parents have a right to send their children to denominational schools, and the second is whether schools that are funded by the State should be run by the State.

In answer to question one, of course parents have a right to send their children to faith schools. They also have a right to state funding for those schools. They are taxpayers after all and generally our taxes should go where we, the taxpayers, want them to go.

Half of parents still favour sending their children to denominational schools. Obviously this implies that there should be fewer such schools than at present, something the likes of Bishop Leo O'Reilly, the hierarchy's education spokesman, has already acknowledged.

In answer to the second question, no, there is no necessary reason why the State should run the schools it funds. In ultra-secular Britain, a third of state-funded schools are run by the churches and they are extremely popular with parents because state-run schools are often run very badly.

But why should this be a surprise? The State generally runs things badly. Check out the state of our healthcare system for example.

In our present state of anger with the Church there is a remote danger that we might do as they did in Newfoundland in 1997, namely withdraw public funding from all denominational schools. But if we do this we will rue the day.

Even that left-wing utopia, Sweden, can see that a one-size-fits-all state-run schooling system is a bad idea, which is why it operates a system which allows parents send their children to their school of choice.

Fortunately, both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael accept the parental choice argument. Labour, on the other hand, is mired in confusion and sub-McCarthyite fantasies about Catholic infiltration of the civil service.