Students walk near a cross as they change classes at St Patrick School in Smithtown, NY, US. Photo: OSV News /
Gregory A. Shemitz. Maeve Mahon hopes arguments against religious schools will be ‘done and dusted’ in the near future
The head of the Catholic secondary schools trust CEIST has said she hopes that within the next 15 years Catholic schools will no longer have to defend their place in the Irish education system.
Maeve Mahon, CEO of CEIST (Catholic Education An Irish Schools’ Trust), said the argument that there is no room for religious schools in a State system should be “done and dusted” by 2035–2040.
Speaking on The Irish Catholic’s Education Nation podcast, Ms Mahon was asked what she hoped Catholic education would look like in 2035 or 2040, and what she hoped would have been left behind.
“What I hope we’ll have lost, perhaps, is this need for us to constantly have to, if you like, say, ‘This is why we’re here, and we deserve a place in the system’ – that we’re not apologising for ourselves for much longer,” she said.
“I think we have stopped that in the main, but I think there is still a narrative out there that the State needs a secular State system, and that there’s no place for religious denominational schools in that system. I hope that conversation will be done and dusted by then… and it will have been settled.”
‘No such thing as value-free’
Ms Mahon rejected the idea that any school could be neutral on values. “In a truly secular society there is a space for everybody, and there is no such thing as a value-free society,” she said. “Every kind of institution you have – a school, a State school – still has values. It must have, or else what is it about?”
“This narrative that we’re hearing a lot of, that we need a value-free [system], that we don’t need a place that has Christian values – there’s no such thing as a value-free environment. There are values no matter what.”
She said she hoped the debate currently underway at the Education Convention and elsewhere, which “seems to be a lot about whether we should have any kind of school except a State school”, would have disappeared, and that there would instead be recognition of “a space for all kinds of different educational systems”.
“We all have a space. We all can claim a space,” she said.
‘In for the long haul’
Ms Mahon said her chief hope was that CEIST schools would not lose “who we are, and why we are”, and would remain places where students “are seen, and they know that they’re seen, they’re valued, and they’re loved”.
“I hope our CEIST schools will still be able to see that at the heart of their schools is the person of Jesus Christ and the values that he espoused, and that that’s what we’ll be working from – that that’s the why we do what we do, because we believe in the story. That would be my hope.”
She acknowledged that falling pupil numbers would mean fewer schools. “We probably will have less schools because, as we know, the demographics are going down anyway. So schools are going to have to rationalise, and we are going to have to rationalise our schools,” she said.
“But I think we will still do what we’ve set out to do, which is to continue to provide Catholic education for those who want it. As long as that need is there, CEIST will be there to answer it.
She concluded: “I firmly believe we’ll all still be here. I think CEIST schools are in for the long haul.”