Ireland takes on the Catholic Church again, now over schools

The Roman Catholic Church controls 90% of Ireland's public elementary schools

Last week, Ireland voted to repeal a constitutional ban on abortion. Almost before that epochal change can sink in, the government is taking steps to end another practice backed by the Catholic Church: a provision that gives preference in most of the country’s elementary schools to children who have been baptised.

Under a school admissions bill that passed the lower house of the Irish parliament this week, Catholic elementary schools would be barred from discriminating in favour of children of their own “religious ethos.” The bill still must pass the upper house this month, but most analysts expect it will be approved.

The Roman Catholic Church controls 90 per cent of Ireland’s public elementary schools, owning the property and appointing school boards and principals, even though the government pays the bills. Many non-Catholic parents, particularly in small towns and rural areas, find they have no choice but to send their children to local schools teaching Catholic faith formation.

And in years where the school intake is oversubscribed, a “baptism barrier” permits the school to refuse a place to a local non-Catholic child if a Catholic child — even one from outside the area — has applied for the same spot.

The policy is resented by parents who belong to smaller religious faiths, including many recent immigrants, and by the growing number of Irish parents who profess no faith at all. There have been numerous anecdotal reports in recent years of nonreligious parents baptizing their children merely so they can be sure of avoiding discrimination when it comes time for them to start school.

While 78.3 per cent of Irish people identified themselves as Catholic in the last census in 2016, this was a decrease from 93 per cent in 1926, and as Ireland grows more secular and liberal, strict religious observation has declined even more steeply. The breadth of that change was evident last week, when two out of three voters supported a referendum repealing Ireland’s near-total ban on abortion.

© 2018 The New York Times News Service