Opinion: Religion in schools - is it time for change?

Religious bodies control over 95 per cent of Irish primary schools. It is a very odd way for a democracy to run a public service.
The effects reach deep into our education system.

Consider the impact of religious patronage on the curriculum, teacher training, employment rights, relationships and sexuality education, boards of management, LGBTQ staff, daily school runs, or diversity in the teaching profession. Nobody feels it more than the growing number of “opted-out” children from non-religious or minority faith families who sit at the back of the classroom each day, or the teachers who have not completed a Catholic Certificate in Religious Education. Irish society is changing fast.

David Graham is the communications officer with Education Equality

Non-religious marriages outnumbered Catholic marriages in 2020 and 2021. Catholicism has declined as a percentage of the population in every census since 1961.

Well over one million of us did not state a religion in the 2022 census, while more than one in four people aged 25-29 stated that they had no religion.

This cohort is now aged 27-31, and many are already parents. Some are teachers. One of them may soon begin preparing your child’s class for their communion. In most schools, even atheists are expected to evangelise, lead their class in prayer, and attend mass. They are public sector workers, but they can be lawfully discriminated against by their board of management on religious grounds.

The only real effort to address this long-running issue has been school divestment, which emerged from the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector in 2012.

Now called Schools Reconfiguration for Diversity, this is an effort to decrease the number of religious-run schools and increase the provision of multidenominational ones.

The biggest religious patron is the Catholic Church, while the biggest and longest-established multidenominational patron is Educate Together.

So how many live transfers have there been from Catholic to Educate Together patronage? Not one. Given the tiny number of transfers to date (primarily to State-run Education and Training Boards), the Government is highly unlikely to reach its target of 400 multidenominational schools by 2030. Even if this figure is met, however, it would equate to only 12 percent of all primary schools.

This process is not a serious or credible response to diversity in Irish society - a reality that has finally dawned on at least one of the three main parties. Sinn Féin recently passed a motion at its Ard Fheis noting that “many children face daily religious indoctrination against their parents’ conscience and lawful preference” and calling for “the issuing of statutory guidelines to all state-funded schools to give practical application to the constitutional right to not attend religious instruction or worship”.

Such guidelines are long overdue and would help to uphold parental rights. They would not address the integrated curriculum, however.

This allows schools to apply a religious lens to every conceivable subject by teaching pupils, for example, that “puberty is a gift from God”.

The most practical and effective way to vindicate these rights is simply to move religious instruction and worship outside core hours on an opt-in basis. Education Equality has advocated for this for many years.

Our campaign for equal school access led to the repeal of the “baptism barrier” in most schools under the Education (Admission to Schools) Act 2018.

Our proposal to separate faith formation from the curriculum and make it truly optional may be politically ambitious, but it makes perfect sense.

In an increasingly pluralistic and secular republic, a deaf ear can only be turned to these calls for so long. Education Minister Norma Foley has been unavailable to meet us to date, and our most recent request for a meeting has yet to receive a response. Our experience is consistent with the wider government approach to this issue - for now, we are an inconvenience that is best ignored. There may be hope. The Programme for Government includes a commitment to a Citizens’ Assembly on the Future of Education.

Such a forum could investigate school ownership, patronage, and governance arrangements, and might even propose constitutional amendments. Information on the Citizens’ Assembly has proven elusive, however. Its terms of reference have not been published, and it may not happen within the lifetime of the current government.

Even if it eventually goes ahead this year, its recommendations will certainly be shelved until after the next election. We cannot hide from this issue indefinitely. The number of our fellow citizens being impacted is becoming too difficult to ignore.
Irish society has changed. Our schools must too.