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Grants withdrawn from Irish Protestant schools
by Gregg Ryan Ireland Correspondent
SENIOR Anglican clergy have responded angrily to the withdrawal without consultation of ancillary grants to Protestant secondary schools in the Republic of Ireland. They have received the support of the RC Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, in their fight to reverse the decision of the Minister for Education and Science, Batt O’Keefe. Mr O’Keefe has maintained that, on the advice of the Attorney General, the extra grants to Protestant schools are unconstitutional. The Protestant schools contend that they need the grants, which are used for support staff and other services, if they are to survive (News, 31 October 2008). They deny that they are schools for the élite rich, arguing that they serve the non-Roman Catholic community throughout the country. Without these schools, they say, the minority religious community would be denied an education for their children in schools of their chosen ethos. At the Dublin & Glendalough diocesan synod, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Neill, said that the government had neither signalled the cuts nor given an opportunity for a real engagement to take place. This action would place severe pressure on the schools, some of which could close as a result, and was the reversal of what had been the policy of successive Irish governments since the introduction of free secondary education in 1967. “It is my distinct impression that the re-classification of the Protestant schools was not driven by financial considerations. It was driven by what amounts to a very determined and doctrinaire effort within the Department of Education and Science to strike at a sector which some officials totally failed to understand. Previous governments . . . each understood and treated these schools in a fair manner. The same cannot be said of the present Fianna Fáil/Green Party coalition,” he said. Dr Neill thanked Archbishop Martin on national radio for his support for the Protestant position. At his diocesan synod, the Bishop of Cork, Dr Paul Colton, said that Protestants in the Irish Republic had traditionally “kept their heads down” since the foundation of the state. “We won’t be keeping our heads down on this one,” he said. The Cashel & Ossory synod, led by its Bishop, the Rt Revd Michael Burrows, has passed a motion conveying to the Minister for Education and Science its disquiet at the unilateral re-designation of Protestant-managed voluntary secondary schools outside the “free” sector. It states its concern that the full contents of the advice of the Attorney General on the supposed unconstitutionality of the former financing arrangements are not being made available for open discussion. In a statement from the Committee for Management of Protestant Voluntary Secondary Schools, the minister was accused of actively seeking a way to discontinue parity for Protestant schools with the free education system. “Having in recent weeks given a whole range of spurious reasons why the Protestant voluntary secondary schools cannot have parity with the free system — as it has had for 40 years — the minister has now settled on a single reason: advice from the Attorney General,” the statement says.
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