Just eight schools divested of church patronage

On entering office former education minister Ruairi Quinn made it one of his top priorities to introduce plurality into a church-dominated education system.

That was 2011, and almost five years on very little has changed — just eight schools have been taken out of the hands of the church.

As Mr Quinn summed it up, if the Catholic Church was a commercial company the Competition Authority would order it to divest itself of at least half of its urban schools.