We really don’t have a personalised school for everyone in the audience

RYE? Sourdough? Pumpernickel?”

I felt like I was in a New York deli trying to order a sandwich as I read the Department of Education’s new survey of parental preferences on school patronage. A voice in my head kept screaming, “I just want an education, for crying out loud!”

The Bill on school enrolment which Minister Quinn is bringing to Government sounds so sane. Banning long waiting lists, which militate against new-comers, as well as free passes into a school if your daddy or mammy is a former pupil is an issue of basic justice.

Why, when the minister is seemingly capable of such strong action on enrolment is he bowing to every parent’s whim when it comes to patronage? Twenty-three of the 38 areas surveyed reported a call for a change of patron big enough to justify a four-teacher school. Most wanted Educate Together schools, two specified the VEC schools and one wanted a new gaelscoil.

That all sounds perfectly reasonable. But reading the report made me realise the stupidity of attempting to offer every Irish parent his or her choice of educational provision. Because it’s not possible. And it wastes precious resources.

The report will only be valid for another four years as new parents enter the system, anyway. What will they want, I wonder? Will a Catholic school, subdivided to provide the “choice” of multi-denominational education, be subdivided again if the Church of the Latter-day Saints has a sudden upswing? Will the Seventh Day Adventists hold up in the staff room? What we need instead of this crazy patchwork of parental preferences is a State education system.

We need to reverse the decision made at the State’s foundation that it would leave education to others. Which in those days meant the churches.

The theory advanced to explain this decision was that we had been badly stung by the British use of the primary school system as a nation-building tool and didn’t want to repeat it. And so we were saved from saluting the Tricolour every morning in the school yard.

The church system probably served most people fairly well for a long time. But now we are a far more diverse people in a very open country and we really don’t have a personalised school for everyone in the audience.

Now is the time for the State to take control of our schools. Now, when we have faced such an existential crisis that the State has taken control of our banks and vast tracts of land all over the country. Now, when we have to make every cent work to provide as much quality education as possible.

The State needs to be able to use its resources rationally. And that can’t happen when you attempt to fund every type of school parents can dream up.

In my area two Catholic gaelscoils are separated by a thin wall. My kids have been lucky enough to go to one of them. But I do not see how two gaelscoils can offer a suitable educational service in an area which is ethnically diverse and has its fair share of children challenged by English.

As an Irish-speaker who learned her Irish from committed Church of Ireland national school teachers, I would prefer to see superb Irish in every school than to see gaelscoils outside the gaeltacht.

In Ballinasloe, the report tells me, there is a Church of Ireland school with five pupils. My local Church of Ireland school is jammers but few of the children go to the parish church, though most of them must have got into the school on their C of I ticket.

Inevitably, some people have baptised their children strategically in order to get into their local C of I school.

I have even heard of one such family switching back to the Catholics to get into the poshest secondary school in the area.

All of this is barking mad. And I say this as a church-going Christian whose kids have gained massively from religion in their Catholic schools.

I won’t ever forget my eldest son’s Service of Light prior to Confirmation. The parents faced their children on the brink of maturity, a candle between them, which lit up the love in their faces.

It felt like my daughter made her First Communion in the bosom of a huge, loving family because she was with her classmates.

But the biggest benefit of Catholicism to my family has been in my autistic son’s education in a John of God school. I remember the priest who touched his head the day he came into the school, a simple loving gesture which said it all. I take such solace from the school’s Christian ethos which sees my son valued and loved just for being himself.

None of us will ever forget his First Communion, when, schooled for hours by his teachers, he knew what to do in a social situation for the first time in his life. As he approached the altar to be part and take part we were all bawling.

But I have the maturity to understand that the State can’t possibly replicate this special school with another of a different religious ethos. It shouldn’t try.

The only school model which could make sense of all these clashing desires is the VEC model. These are the only State primary schools and they allow a small amount of time for faith-formation within the school day for about four weeks in the year, according to the different faiths represented in the school.

There are now six such schools, with five more due to open and two more called for in the report. The fact that there were, by contrast, 20 Educate Together schools called for, should not lead us to abandon the State model.

Educate Together has been a brilliant campaigning organisation and runs great schools, but it is, fundamentally, more of the same. It is an ideological organisation which will never come close to pleasing parents of a different ideology.

When we take schools back from the churches we do not need to give them to another ideological organisation. We need to run them as State schools.

Given our history, I do not see a majority of Irish parents wanting to abandon religion within the school day any time soon. Educate Together will not and should not take charge of the State’s educational provision. Minister Quinn, with the Department of Education, should take charge of education himself.

Better leave the ideological space in our schools open for parents to fill as they see fit. Many of them want faith-formation. Let them have it, provided by people who believe what they are saying, not teachers parroting words they don’t believe. Let’s not fill the ideological space with nationalism, as the French do. And let’s not fill it with forced secularism.

Let’s have an end to surveys and questionnaires, recognise we live in a democratic state and let that democratic state run our schools.