Cathal Barry
Stance has eroded goodwill, TD claims
The former chairman of the Labour Party has warned that the Government’s hostility towards the Church has destroyed any chance of compromise on the handover of some Catholic schools.
Galway East TD Colm Keaveney also insisted that the “issue of school divestment is being driven by a highly-motivated minority within society”.
Writing in The Irish Catholic this week, Mr Keaveney said that the divestment of some Catholic schools to other patron bodies such as Educate Together was “undoubtedly popular with much of the media, broadcast and print, and those committed to it are dominant on social media”.
However, he warned that “any chance of compromise on this issue was destroyed by the intransience and hostility of elements within both Fine Gael and Labour”.
He said that while many Government politicians publicly supported divestment, they were hostile when divestment was considered in their local area.
“As [former Education Minister] Ruairí Quinn found, once you get around to actually implementing it, particularly in the absence of a partnership approach, you run into significant resistance,” he said.
Describing a limited handover of some Catholic schools as a “possible solution” to the “perceived wish by many for non-Catholic ethos schools and the current dominance of the Church in the education sector”, Mr Keaveney warned that “any chance of compromise on this issue was destroyed by the intransience and hostility of elements within both Fine Gael and Labour”.
The Dáil deputy, who was expelled from the Labour parliamentary party in 2012 for refusing to back Government cuts to respite care, claimed “influential elements” within his former party “supported divestment but wanted it entirely on their own terms”.
Mr Keaveney also criticised the Forum for Patronage and Pluralism, which was set up by Mr Quinn, claiming its “final findings were never in doubt given its ideological make-up”.
He insisted that some of its recommendations “would result in Catholic ethos schools compromising their ethos to the point that it no longer had any substantive or distinctive qualities to it”.
“This would have impacted on all religious communities in Ireland, not just on Catholics, despite the fact that significant numbers of families continue to want their children to be educated within a religious ethos,” he said.
Noting that “much of the goodwill on the Church’s side has been eroded by the hostility of the current Government parties towards the Church”, Mr Keaveney, who joined Fianna Fáil in 2013, said the “issue of religious ethos in our schools and the challenge of responding to the greater pluralism of our society can be solved, but can only be done through honest engagement, a willingness of all sides to compromise, and the maintenance of goodwill through respect for the other side to the negotiation”.
