The Irish went to the polls last Friday. While it is too early to know what coalition will be leading the country, one thing is certain: Ireland has new challenges that need to be addressed.
The economy is recovering after the 2018 bailout but new social issues emerge. Investment is once again flowing in and unemployment, although still high, is falling. Inflation is under control and trade surpluses are once again being achieved. Rating agencies are again looking favourably at the country with S&P upgrading Ireland’s rating to A+.
A sense of optimism has returned. The public health service is creaking as a result of austerity measures to cut the deficit. Many families are still struggling to repay their mortgages. Some argue that social justice in Ireland is slowly being eroded with the rich becoming richer while the poor face desperation.
I have always followed the socio-economic scene in Ireland as it is often so similar to that of Malta. The role of the Catholic Church in Irish society is gradually changing. Today Irish society is much more secular than it ever was. It is also a more diverse society as tens of thousands of economic migrants settled in Ireland – mainly in the short period of economic success when the Celtic tiger was considered a haven for hard-working Europeans and Asians who wanted a better quality of life.
In relatively recent years the Catholic Church in Ireland lost the battles over divorce, contraception and gay marriages. But it still wields what some sociologists call the ‘baptism barrier influencing admissions to public schools. In fact, 97 per cent of state-funded schools in Ireland are under church control. Irish law allows the church to consider religion the main factor in admissions in these schools. The result of this archaic situation is that non-Catholics are discriminated against when they try to register their children for state-funded education.
The religious ethos that permeates schools runs contrary to Irish law
Irish politicians are not moving a finger to tell Church leaders to drop the pretensions that they have a divine right to rule people’s conscience and religious preferences. This is embarrassing Irish political leaders. Recently, a delegation from Ireland appeared in front of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva. James Reilly, the minister responsible for child welfare, was asked “to justify the continuation of preferential access to state-funded schools on the basis of religion”.
A defeatist Reilly admitted that “the government was concerned that current policy permitting admission based on religion was lagging behind a reality of a more diverse society, but that carrying out a more pluralist system had been a problem”. He was not prepared to define the nature of this “problem” – much less to say what the government intended to do to address it.
The normally sedate Irish are increasingly becoming frustrated by the pig-headedness of some Church leaders and the impotence and reverential fear of politicians. Paddy Monahan, a lawyer in Dublin, is leading a movement to reverse this state of affairs by challenging the Church’s vested rights in court.
Education Equality is a recently formed advocacy group chaired by April Duff. Duff is prepared to say what Reilly and his colleagues are afraid of uttering: “We believe the discrimination in entry policies and the religious ethos that permeates schools runs contrary to Irish law and certainly to international law on human rights, and as an organisation we are planning to challenge their legality.”
Church leaders are themselves divided on how to project Catholic education in the 21st century as today it still seems to be anchored in the social culture of the 1950s. Archbishop Diarmund Martin of Dublin accused unnamed individuals in the Catholic educational establishment of “resisting necessary reform”. He warned that “unless people of other faiths and no faith were given more freedom to attend nonreligious schools, Catholic education would actually be diluted rather than strengthened”.
But many Irish church leaders do not share these views. Another archbishop, Eamon Martin, the church’s most senior prelate in Ireland, says that “pluralism in education should not be forced but should evolve over time” So many in the Catholic hierarchy prefer to drag their feet – feeling that if they do not talk about this discrimination, it will go away.
Ireland faces new issues that go beyond economic growth. The challenge of easing tensions in a multi-cultural society will be one of the most daunting.
johncassarwhite@yahoo.com