Suffer the Little Children

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Ireland Calling with John Spain

Suffer the Little Children

September 13, 2007

By John Spain

LAST week was back to school week in Ireland, an important and often emotional time for parents and children, especially the little ones starting school for the first time. This year, in some areas around Dublin with large immigrant populations, it was even more fraught than usual. Pressure for school places reached crisis point, with the result that it looked like some kids might have to be turned away.

Even worse, it quickly became clear that the kids who were finding it hard to get a place in their local school were all from immigrant families, and many of them were black. Which immediately led to TV cameras and a melodramatic report on the RTE prime time news suggesting in shocked tones that racism was at work and that the Catholic Church and the state authorities were allowing it to happen.

What had actually happened was a lot more complex and a lot less dramatic than the news reports suggested. Due to the huge population growth in some of the big new housing areas in North County Dublin and on the west side of the city, some pressure points had emerged. Some kids were not able to get into the school nearest their homes. That much was clear.

What was unclear was whether all of the immigrant parents had applied for places in the schools in time, or whether they had just turned up on the day. But clearly there was a problem and it needed to be examined dispassionately.

That was not enough for some sections of the media here who are always waiting for the chance to discover racism in Irish society and be outraged. So instead of a clear analysis of the problem, what we got was emotive lecturing about our “failure” to provide for the new multi-cultural Ireland.

In Balbriggan, a commuter town in North County Dublin that has seen a population explosion in the last few years, the Department of Education organized a meeting for parents who had failed to find a school place for their kids, and about 70 of the parents turned up.

As one shocked reporter who went along discovered, apart from the few journalists and teachers present, almost everyone in the room was black. Cue more horrified headlines.

What was happening in Balbriggan, however, was not any different than in a few other areas on the north and west side of Dublin, in places where there are vast new housing estates where accommodation is cheaper and new immigrants have settled.

In some of these areas there were not enough places for all the kids and a few had to travel to adjoining areas to get into a school, although in Balbriggan the numbers involved were higher. But to present the situation as some kind of deliberate racist attitude by the Catholic Church or the state was grossly misleading.

To put it in context, the number of kids attending primary schools in Ireland this year will reach 485,000, up by tens of thousands over the past few years. Out of that number, around 50 kids in North County Dublin and perhaps another 50 on the west side of the city had problems finding a place this year.

Those on the west side have already been found a school, and those on the north will all have started in a new emergency school before the end of this month. So the fact is that no child will be “locked out” of school here, to use an emotive phrase from an Irish Times editorial last week.

It is true that the system is struggling to cope and that the situation will continue to be difficult in the coming years because the numbers are still growing fast, with an extra 100,000 enrolments in primary schools here expected over the coming 10 years. But to say that there is an element of racism involved is daft.

What is involved is the historical background to Ireland’s educational system. For historical reasons that we all know about, the Catholic Church has played a huge role in the provision of education in Ireland. Since the foundation of the state that involvement has continued and deepened.

To put it simply, the state does not directly provide schools but encourages local people, usually through their church, to find a site and establish a school which the state then funds, helping with building and maintenance costs and paying the teachers. The school is then run by its patron and board of management, usually the local priest and the parents.

This arrangement has given the Catholic Church enormous power in the school system in Ireland, even though the state pays most of the bills and the rest is paid by local people through donations to school fund raisers organized by the church.

There are about 3,250 primary schools in Ireland, and just over 3,000 of them are Catholic. Of the remainder, there are just under 200 Protestant schools, 40 multi-denominational schools and a few other schools for minority religions, or no religion.

So there are Presbyterian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist or whatever schools here now, and the state supports them just like the Catholic schools, and the ethos of those schools reflects the beliefs of the patron and parents who set up the schools. They are few in number because there are few people in each grouping, and of course these people usually are not all in one area.

As Ireland has become less church dominated in the past 20 years, the strict dividing lines between schools have blurred somewhat. In my own case, the nearest primary school to our house was a Protestant one so that’s where my three kids went, even though they are nominally Catholic (I used to be Catholic, I’m now a sun worshipper!)

At enrolment time Protestant kids were given priority, and then anyone else who applied was taken in if there was room. The same thing has been going on in most Catholic schools, where kids of other religions or no religion are welcome once all the Catholic kids have been accommodated. Usually there is room for everyone.

Or at least there was until the huge wave of immigration that swept over Ireland in the past 10 years. With around 14% of the population now reckoned to be of non-Irish origin and many of those being young parents having families, the number of non-Catholic, even non-Christian kids looking for places in schools here in certain concentrated areas, has shot up.

What happened in North County Dublin last week shows this. But it also showed that it was the increase in sheer numbers that was the problem, rather than religion or race.

The Catholic schools in the area gave preference to Catholic kids and then took in as many immigrant kids as they could. But there were not enough places for everyone, and the ones who were left out were the new arrivals.

I’m not a big fan of the Catholic Church but I respect the right of parents here to send their kids to Catholic schools if they wish, especially schools that they support and help to fund. Clearly Catholic kids must have priority in such schools, and it’s not fair to condemn the Catholic Church for enforcing that in its enrolment policy.

It’s also hard even for a sun worshipper like me not to have some sympathy for the Catholic Church here in this situation. Why should it be the church’s responsibility to provide school places for everyone?

In fact for the last two years the Catholic Church in Dublin has been warning the state that there was a developing problem because of the huge growth in numbers in some areas. Over the past year or two we have just managed to cope and get every kid into school immediately. This year it went wrong, at least until the department stepped in with emergency measures.

The Archbishop of Dublin, a decent, reasonable man (his brother is a journalist!) said last week that, given the changing face of Ireland, he recognized that the church was now over-represented in the school management system here and that it was time for “a plurality of patronage and providers of education.” He also pointed out that half of this year’s junior infants class (the entry class) in Balbriggan’s Catholic school are the children of immigrants.

Part of the problem in all this is that the state has been a bit slow in stepping in to the role usually carried by the Catholic Church (and other churches). But that is now changing.

I remember that when my brother sent his kids to a new multi-denominational school in Glasnevin on Dublin’s North Side 15 years ago, it was considered revolutionary and the parents involved were stretched to the limit trying to fund the school. I also remember that the Catholic Church would not let them use a vacant school building they owned in the area.

But that was then. The fierce opposition of the Catholic Church to multi-denominational schools at the time has now eased. And there are now 40 multi-denominational schools in the country, many run by Educate Together, the nationwide organization of parents who support the principle of getting kids together rather than keeping them apart.

It was to Educate Together that Education Minister Mary Hanafin turned last week when the crisis blew up in Balbriggan and she needed a patron in a hurry. Emergency accommodation was found (in a children’s holiday complex nearby) and Educate Together was able to provide teachers at short notice. A permanent site for the new school will be found.

And the interesting thing about this is that Educate Together only agreed to get the department out of this hole on the undertaking that the state will fund the site and building of the new school, thereby breaking the traditional state policy that local groups (or churches) must always provide new schools themselves before the department will take them over and pay teachers.

This is the second time that Educate Together has rescued Hanafin. A couple of months back she recognized a new school started by Educate Together in the town of Lucan on the west side of Dublin where again there are large numbers of immigrants. Without it there would have been another 170 children searching for school places in the overcrowded existing schools in that area.

Clearly, the state needs to rethink its reliance on others (like the churches) to provide us with schools. But there are no easy answers to the problems now facing us. And you never hear the proponents of the wonders of a multi-cultural Ireland discussing where the money is to come from to solve these problems.

Indeed, one could ask many pertinent questions about this situation. How many of the parents who could not get their kids into Balbriggan school last week were illegal immigrants? We don’t know, because you are not allowed to ask questions like that here.

And in the Junior Infant class where half the kids are immigrants, how many of the kids have good English so that they are not holding back the other half of the class who are Irish? Again such questions are not encouraged, even though they are of great concern to the Irish parents with kids in that class.

In spite of all the officially supported propaganda about the benefits of a multi-cultural society here, most people here see real problems. The main benefactors so far seem to have been employers looking for cheap labor.

That’s not much use to the schools trying to cope. The only thing that everyone agrees on is that the children must not be made to suffer.

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